I’ve written previously on running SQL Server in Docker. At that time, you couldn’t run Docker containers on the Home edition of Windows, but now we’re able to run Linux containers on Home. (I’m using Windows 11 Home edition).
To do this, we’ll need to install WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). This will allow us to run Linux tools and applications on our Windows machine.
Prerequisites:
To run Docker, we’ll need a machine with a 64 bit processor and at least 4 GBs of RAM. We’ll also need virtualization enabled. For my machine, it was already enabled, but we can check from the command line by running:
systeminfo
Under ‘Hyper-V Requirements’, look for the value for ‘Virtualization Enabled In Firmware’. If it’s No, then you’ll need to enable virtualization.
Install:
Run this command in Powershell (as an Admin) to install WSL:
wsl --install
We’ll need to restart after the install has completed. Once the PC is back up, the console will prompt us to create a UNIX user account, so we’ll provide a username and password.
We can get Docker Desktop here. Download and run the executable to setup. We’ll be prompted to restart again after the install has completed. You can create a Docker account, but that’s not required.
Verify Docker Install:
From the command line, we can get the Docker version number:
docker --version
We can also retrieve and run a sample container:
docker run hello-world
Links:
Docker Docs
SQL Rob 