Use and Limitations of vSphere Integrated Containers Engine

vSphere Integrated Containers Engine currently includes the following capabilities and limitations:

Supported Docker Features

This version of vSphere Integrated Containers Engine supports these features:

  • docker-compose
  • Pulling images from Docker hub and private registries
  • Named data volumes
  • Anonymous data volumes
  • Sharing concurrent NFS share points between containers
  • Bridged networks
  • External networks
  • Port mapping
  • Network links/aliases

Unsupported Docker Features

This version of vSphere Integrated Containers Engine does not support these features:

  • Pulling images via image digest
  • Mapping a local host folder to a container volume
  • Mapping a local host file to a container
  • docker push
  • docker build

For limitations of using vSphere Integrated Containers with volumes, see Using Volumes with vSphere Integrated Containers Engine.

Limitations of vSphere Integrated Containers Engine

vSphere Integrated Containers Engine includes these limitations:

  • If you do not configure a PATH environment variable, or if you create a container from an image that does not supply a PATH, vSphere Integrated Containers Engine provides a default PATH.
  • You can resolve the symbolic names of a container from within another container, except in the following cases:
    • Aliases
    • IPv6
    • Service discovery
  • Containers can acquire DHCP addresses only if they are on a network that has DHCP.
  • When you use a standard Docker Engine, an image can have a maximum of 120 layers. When you use a vSphere Integrated Containers Engine virtual container host (VCH), an image can have a maximum of 90 layers. For more information, see Pulling Images into VCHs Fails with Image Store Error in the Troubleshooting section.

Using docker-compose with TLS

vSphere Integrated Containers supports TLS v1.2, so you must configure docker-compose to use TLS 1.2. However, docker-compose does not allow you to specify the TLS version on the command line. You must use environment variables to set the TLS version for docker-compose. For more information, see docker-compose issue 4651. Furthermore, docker-compose has a limitation that requires you to set TLS options either by using command line options or by using environment variables. You cannot use a mixture of both command line options and environment variables.

To use docker-compose with vSphere Integrated Containers and TLS, set the following environment variables:

COMPOSE_TLS_VERSION=TLSv1_2
DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1
DOCKER_CERT_PATH="path to your certificate files"

The certificate file path must lead to CA.pem, key.pem, and cert.pem. You can run docker-compose with the following command:

docker-compose -H vch_address up

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