docker-machine on z Systems

Recent posts have shown how to get compose, swarm, and the registry working. Of the prominent docker tools, the last one missing is docker-machine. machine is a tool that turns a Linux server into a Docker host. It can even create the server in the first place, e.g. in various public Cloud environments or through OpenStack. https://docs.docker.com/machine/ is the starting point of the documentation.

Let's see how docker-machine can be adapted for Linux on z Systems. Caution: long post.
We will use the generic driver which uses an existing Linux image as starting point, and uses its ssh access to make it a Docker host. First step -- let's setup the build environment for machine.

Container Patterns

Containers can be deployed in several ways, depending on goals and usage scenarios. Let's have a look at typical patterns and view this in light of z Systems:

New Docker Binaries on developerWorks

The Docker page on developerWorks provides links to new Docker binaries. They are now at version 1.8.2 and provided for SLES 12 and RHEL 7.1.
Building this took a while: for proper operation, two fixes from glibc (1 and 2) would be required. However, installing a modified glibc on your system is not required, since the Docker binaries come with code working around the defects in glibc.