Windows versions

Applications in Windows Server containers run processes directly on the host, and the version of Windows on your server needs to match the version of Windows inside the container. All of the examples in this book are based on containers that use Windows Server 2019, which means you need a Windows Server 2019 machine to run them – or Windows 10 with the 1809 update (the winver command will tell you which update version you have).

You can run containers built for a different version of Windows if you run them as Hyper-V containers. This gives you backward-compatibility, so you can run a container that was built for Windows Server 2016 on a machine running Windows Server 2019.