Been using Docker for Windows quite a lot lately.
Unfortunately running docker containers on windows is still not done natively, so we have to rely on a Linux Hyper-V Virtual Machine. This VM have a tendency to grow large quite fast if you work with many images, and yesterday I found myself running out of space on my C-drive due to that.
Luckily I thought I could just change the settings for the vhd location from the docker for windows settings to my other drive. But nope. That didn’t work. Then I tried to move the Hyper-V disk manually, and changing the path in Hyper-V, which just resulted in Docker for windows reprovisioning the Hyper-V machine to the C-drive again.
In the end, it turns out that this functionality is quite buggy, so the way I managed to move my disk was to close docker completely. And move the disk to my other drive E:\VirtualMachine\MobyLinuxVM.vhdx. When that is done you can edit
C:\Users\blasi\AppData\Roaming\Docker\settings.json and change the value of MobyVhdPathOverride to the new location of the VHDX E:\\VirtualMachine\\MobyLinuxVM.vhdx. When you restart the docker for windows service, it will pick up the change and change your Hyper-V configuration for you.
Categories: docker
Hello, I found your article helpful but a year later it seems like Docker has made this a bit easier. I’m running Docker version 19.03.5, build 633a0ea. In the Docker Desktop settings under resources there is a Docker Image Location setting with a Browse button where you can select a new parent folder for the images. Inside of the folder you select it were create a folder named DockerDesktop and it migrate the DockerDesktop.vhdx file to this new location as it does a restart. For your uses case you would be done. I was interested in migrating my docker images from a different workstation to a new one with an empty docker image file. After migrating my empty vhdx file using docker, I quite Docker Desktop and then in windows services I shut down Docker Desktop Service. I then copied over the vhdx file I had moved from my other computer and restarted the Docker Desktop Service and re launch the Docker Desktop application. When it came up I looked into the settings and saw that the Disk Image Space used had increased from just a few megs to 1.5GB. The original space remained set at 64GB, big enough to hold the space I was bringing in. I imagine if I was going to bring in a larger file I might have needed to increase that setting before hand. I now can execute a docker ps -a cmd in ps and see my images. Thanks for the good article as it gave me the info I needed to work this out.
Just for anyone who finds this site to answer how to move Hyper-V VM for docker desktop. The approach of changing the Disk image locations in the Advanced section of the settings DOES work in the latest versions of Docker Desktop. This would probably be the easiest and safest solution.
Don’t forget windows 10 knows the concept on symlinks too. Creating a symlink like you do in linux is might have saved you some time.
$ mklink DockerDesktop.vhdx D:\docker\DockerDesktop.vhdx
in cmd
This didn’t work for me and docker for windows service doesn’t work anymore 🙁