NanoServer Container Base Image - It does Exist...Somewhere!

A really interesting video from Microsoft was just released with Mark Russinovich (CTO of Azure if you don’t already know) demonstrating Windows Server Containers. What is really interesting about this demo is that he is demonstrating containers using a Windows NanoServer Base Image:

Nano Server Containers Base Image - it does exist.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts here and here you’ll know I spent quite some time looking at this and trying to get it going with TP3. I deduced it was not possible yet without the Windows NanoServer Base Image for containers - which had not been provided by Microsoft.

Other eagle eyed viewers will also note that he appears to be running a Nano Server container on a Full Server container host which I didn’t actually think was possible. From what I originally understood about containers is that you could only instantiate a container using a base container image matching the version of the OS the container host used. E.g. You can not instantiate a Server Core container on a NanoServer container host - I confirmed this was the case in TP3. But perhaps I misunderstood, or perhaps containers can be instantiated on “up” version container hosts but not “down” version.

Edit: Actually on further examination he is remoting into a different server that is acting as a Container Host (10.205.158.127). So I can’t assume that this remote host is a Full Server - it could well be a NanoServer. So the above paragraph isn’t relevant.

I also notice that he demos Hyper-V Containers, which as far as I am aware aren’t working on TP3. So this would indicate a more recent build than TP3.

So perhaps we’ll see this image being made available in the Windows Server 2016 TP4 release?