Bind dedicated ip to docker container in Windows Server 2022

[ntrappe-msft]

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Discussed in https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-Containers/discussions/488

^{Originally posted by vadimen April 25, 2024}
I have a Windows server 2022 host and on it, I launched a docker container running the same Windows server core OS. This server has 2 IPs attached to it and I want one of them to be assigned only to one of my containers. Container has an app running on port 8080, on container creation I used -p 8080:8080.

Many answers to this mention macvlan or ipvlan, but they are available to network drivers only for Linux.

Here my supposed dedicated IP that I want to assign to the container is 12.123.123.17.

Tried this:

docker network create --gateway 12.123.123.1 --subnet 12.123.123.0/24 -d transparent -o com.docker.network.windowsshim.enable_outboundnat=true test_net2

docker network connect --ip 12.123.123.17 test_net2 epic_rosalind

also tried without

-o com.docker.network.windowsshim.enable_outboundnat=true

besides transparent I also tried nat and l2bridge

-d nat worked and I could access my container app through a dedicated IP, it's just that I could also access other containers, but I need this IP to be tied only to one container.

The option to link directly to the host IP also doesn't work

docker run -p 12.123.123.17:8080:8080 --name cont_v1  mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2022 -it powershell

C:\Program Files\Docker\docker.exe: Error response from daemon: failed to create endpoint cont_v3 on network nat: Windows does not support host IP addresses in NAT settings.

Docker version 29.1.0, build 2ae903e

As I understand the new experimental host network feature is made only for linux also. Couldn't launch, it's not very straightforward to install docker desktop in windows server 2022 core.

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[adrianm-msft]

To assign a specific IP address to a Docker container on Windows, simply use the --ip flag.

Here is an example:
docker run -itd --name=c0 --network=testnet --ip=12.123.123.17 mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2022 powershell