Error running Docker container on a VMWare hosted Windows 10 machine

Question

I have a windows 10 machine that is hosted on VMWare (vShpere 6.2 ) . I'm trying to run docker container on this machine and I've installed 'Docker for Windows' on the machine. When running the hello-world container I'm getting the following error.

c:\> docker run hello-world
docker: Error response from daemon: container b631237e1d24f87c3a578a753f550ce30aaaf1b5e21b984db5da7b59a83d7c20 encountered an error during CreateContainer: failure in a Windows system call: No hypervisor is present on this system. (0xc0351000) 

The same instructions works on physical machine with windows 10. Hyper-V is enabled on the guest windows-10 machine.

I've found instructions on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/user-guide/nested-virtualization but this is related to Hyper-V and not vmware.

Are there any instructions on how to run docker on a VMWare hosted windows OS? My purpose of using 'Docker for Windows' is so that I'd be able to run windows-continer on the windows-10 guest OS on vware.

Answer 1

Docker for Windows requires hardware virtualization support to run anything via Hyper-V. This means that VMWare has to expose Intel VT-x or AMD-V to the guest OS. This is disabled by default in vSphere, so you have to enable it manually to get docker support in the guest.

From the vSphere docs:

1. Right-click the virtual machine and select Edit Settings.

   a. To locate a virtual machine, select a datacenter, folder, cluster, resource pool, host, or vApp.

   b. Click the Related Objects tab and click Virtual Machines.

2. On the Virtual Hardware tab, expand CPU, and select Expose hardware-assisted virtualization to guest OS.

3. Click OK.

Answer 2

You could try to turn virtualization on in your BIOS, according to an answer to a similar question. Look for “Intel VT-x”, “Intel Virtualization Technology”, “Virtualization Extensions” or something similar.