A few weeks ago I received an excellent question from a community member, which sent me down the fascinating rabbit hole of Windows containers once again. The question, and while I’m paraphrasing, went something along these lines:
“Could you share some information on how page files are allocated in a Windows Server container setting?"
I honestly did not know whether page files would behave differently in a containerized setting, though I suspected that they wouldn’t. I decided to write down and share my findings.
Feel free to read the full blog post!
As I was figuring things out, I used a few Azure services to perform my tests. If you'd like to try some of them out for yourself, feel free to do so. I created a Bicep template that provisions a bunch of resources that should make it pretty straightforward to stress test a container and host's memory and associated page file.
I used some platform-as-a-service offerings:
- Azure Container Registry + Tasks
- Will automatically pull code and build a Windows container image.
- Eventually, the built image is pushed into the registry.
- Azure Container Instance
- Used to run the built Windows container image.
- Azure App Service Plan P1V3
- runs Hyper-V isolated Windows Containers.
- Azure App Services
- Used to run the built Windows container image.
- Memory limit for a single container has been modified to use four-ish GBs of the eight that are available.
And some infrastructure-as-a-service offerings:
- Two Azure Virtual Machines
- One Standard_D4s_v3 and one Standard_E4-2s_v4.
- Visual Studio 2022 latest with Windows Server 2022.
- Two premium Managed Disks
- P10/128 Gb disks
- Two custom script extensions
- A PowerShell script that installs Docker and the Containers and Hyper-V Windows features.
- This becomes deprecated by September 2022.
- A PowerShell script that installs Docker and the Containers and Hyper-V Windows features.
- Virtual Network
- Holds the two VMs.
- Two public IP addresses
- Since we need to connect to it without much hassle.
- Network Security Group
- Only allows RDP from your IP to the VMs.
