I’ve been very happy with Docker Desktop for years, running it on both laptop and desktop. However, a corporate decision was made to move to Rancher Desktop, so I now have an unexpected “opportunity” to learn something new.
Here’s a short post on how things went on the desktop and laptop.
Getting Rancher Desktop
I had never heard of Rancher. I’ve met a number of Linux/Oracle people using Podman, but not Rancher. You can download Rancher from rancherdesktop.io. This is a project from SUSE, of the Linux distribution fame, and one of their many projects.
The install is a next/next/next standard Windows MSI, though once installed, I found I needed WSL2 on my desktop. On my laptop, I ran wsl –v and saw this.
On my desktop, I installed this first, and tried to get things going. It installed, downloaded some Kuberbetes things, asked me to use containerd or dockerd (I chose the latter), and then was running. Once the engine was up, my docker commands worked and I could start containers.
However, there was a problem in that I had a volume (unnamed) that a few containers were using. However, after uninstalling Docker Desktop, I couldn’t find the volumes. I’m lightly concerned I’ve lost some data, which isn’t the end of the world, but it annoying.
Learning From My Mistakes
On my laptop, I decided to try and make this smoother. First, I uninstalled Docker.
Next I ran the Rancher install.
Once this installed, I started the desktop program. It again downloaded some Kubernetes components and then seemed to be up and running.
I tried Docker components after starting the Rancher Desktop (RD), but before I realized it was downloading stuff. That was the docker error shown first below. The second one was once the online status was shown in RD.
First Tests
I have a few containers set up to run SQL Server with docker compose files. I have a batch file I double click for “docker compose up” (and another for down). I clicked one and saw this: images downloading.
I assumed an image store would be an image store, but apparently not. Rancher must use a different place. That’s an interesting thing I need to check. Do I have extra images laying around. I think my Docker Desktop was using containerd, so maybe that’s part of this.
I could connect from SSMS fine and I could see my container running in the desktop (I had to switch away from the Containers item and back).
I also checked some docker commands and they seemed to work. I could get a list of containers, and apparently Rancher runs a bunch itself.
I could also see logs from my container, which are handy at times when I need to try and debug an issue.
Summary
I have to admit that after a week, I’m still nervous. Losing a volume, whether it’s really gone or I just can’t find it, is disturbing. I hate losing data.
Rancher seems to work fine for the basic things I do with containers, though the interface feels incomplete and simple. I can’t set hardware limits, it isn’t an active interface, and I feel like I’ve lost a lot of options. I didn’t really use more, but I still feel some loss.
I haven’t heard internal complaints from anyone, so I’m assuming that most container based things still work. We’ll see how I like this across the next month.