Can I run Docker directly on a non VT-X machine (n

Question

I would like to use Docker on servers with 80546k Xeon Irwindale CPUs. These CPUs are 64bit but don't support Intel VT-X virtualization. VirtualBox won't run on this machine. I'm planning to install Linux directly on the hardware (No VM layer) and use Docker to virtualize applications. Is this possible? I found a lot of discussions about Docker and VT-x, but all of them concern a Virtual Machine such as VirtualBox besides Docker.

Thanks, Alan

Answer 1

If you are planning to run docker in a linux machine your answer is yes, you can run docker without the need of VT-x or similar technologies in your processor, since Docker only required cgroups to be available on kernel to get the majority of its features working, but if you need to run docker in a Mac OSX or Windows, you will need to install virtualbox to run boot2docker, but it also doesn't mean that you need to have VT-x available in your processor, however you will may notice some performance loss.

For Windows there's a plan to get docker working there without any virtualization at all, but I believe we will have it on next major update of Windows Server (since there's no plans for future versions of Windows, only updates).

Answer 2

Provided you have linux Docker will run outside of virtual box. For example I have a virtual linux server that runs docker for me and works the same as if you had a virtual box set with linux as the operating system.

Answer 3

You'll need to be running Linux kernel 3.10 or higher. There are also some basic software requirements, which you can find at https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/binaries/. For your specific flavor of Linux, check out https://docs.docker.com/installation/#installation-list.