How to determine if Linux OS is on virtual hardware or physical hardware?

Question

From a Linux OS, is there a way to determine if the OS is running as a guest OS on a virtualized VMware environment as opposed to running directly on non-virtualized/bare metal/physical host? In my case it is either VMware or not, but I am also interested the more general question of whether the OS is on physical hardware or virtualized hardware of any sort.

Use the "virt-what" command. – ewwhite Aug 15 '17 at 15:02 — ewwhite, Aug 15 '17 at 15:02

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 15 '17 at 19:03

5

In VMware:

# dmidecode --string system-product-name
VMware Virtual Platform

In Virtualbox same command outputs VirtualBox

answered Aug 15 '17 at 19:03

MKT

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Orphans · Answer 2 · 2017-08-16T05:12:41.113

2

On newer systems, the command "lscpu" give's you the information you need, inclusive which hypervisor the VM is running on.

edited Aug 16 '17 at 05:12

answered Aug 15 '17 at 14:54

Orphans

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This seems to work for newer versions showing the "Hypervisor vendor:" entry when a hypervisor is present, but doesn't work for older versions that don't have lscpu such as RHEL 5. – Leigh Riffel Aug 15 '17 at 15:11

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 17 '17 at 12:20

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You can look at the output of the following:

virt-what
cat /proc/cpuinfo
dmidecode
lspci
lshw
hwinfo

Any of these will print various things that should point to if and what virtualisation-platform is being used.

answered Aug 17 '17 at 12:20

Sig-IO

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How to determine if Linux OS is on virtual hardware or physical hardware?

3 Answers3