[Tips & Tricks] ServiceDesk Plus on Docker

Containerization is taking IT operations to a whole new level and If you are an IT Ninja or in to Enterprise IT, you've heard of Docker.

With the increasing popularity of containerization\Docker, many of you are already thinking about hosting an SDP instance on Docker. Hence to make this transition simple and quick we have come up with a step by step instructions to install ServiceDesk plus on Docker for your reference and we hope our readers find this helpful.

A quick overview on Docker and the purpose it solves:

Let’s say you need to Host an application and make it available to the public, you need someplace to host it. In the past, you would need to host this on a Dedicated Server or a Physical Computer.

Then, the age of “Virtualization” came in. Hosting applications on VM became popular due to its advantages like: Easy maintenance, Multiple OS environments can exist simultaneously on the same machine, isolated from each other and availability and convenient recovery.

But the above two computing services still cannot solve one thing — heavy Operating System usage. Let’s think about operating systems like Windows, Linux (RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc), and macOS. These OS s are large in size and can easily go over 1 Gigabyte, also known as “OS image.”

However, your application may only have an approximated size of 300 MB to start with. So, why would you want a “virtual machine”that has the size of 1 GB + when your application is much much less than that? That’s where the concept of “container” comes in to fix that.

Is this the only issue Docker solves? Definitely No, the picture below explains it all!

The application works fine in our Laptop, but it doesn't work on Production server or a user's machine due to the difference in computing the environment between the two.

Docker is a platform that packages an application and all its dependencies together in the form of containers. This containerization aspect of Docker ensures that the application works in any environment.

How is Docker different from VM?

Instructions to Install SDP on Docker (Attached a Word and Pdf doc)

Prerequisites :

1) Steps to install Docker: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/

2)Download ServiceDeskplus .bin for Linux on the host machine ( Windows) from: https://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/download.html?opDownload_indexbnr

3)Create a folder “SDP” and move the .bin file

Here, this will help to share the folder with the docker container.

For illustration, we have used CentOS image on Docker. However, the steps remain the same for other Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian. etc.

Docker: 19.03.8

Host OS: Windows 10

Container : CentOS:7

Once Docker is installed and running,

Step 1 : Open command prompt or Powershell and install or Pull Centos:7 ( Docker Image)

Command to install centos on this container :

Docker pull centos:7

This will pull an image of the centos7 from Docker Hub and create the container required to host applications on this Centos.

Step 2 : Give a name to this container and start the container

Command :

docker run -it —name sdp -p 8085:8080 -v d:\sdp:/root/sdp centos:7 bin/bash

Step 3 : Navigate to /root/sdp inside the CentOs container

Type ls to find the bin file for installation

./ManageEngine_ServiceDesk_Plus_64bits.bin --console
Give the permission for execution with ‘chmod +x’

Run the command as shown below

From this stage, the installation steps remain the same as how we normally install SDP on Linux as mentioned https://help.servicedeskplus.com/introduction/installation-linux.html

Continue the Onscreen instructions to proceed and in case if you encounter an error as shown below- it is safe to ignore.