Virtual or physical?
Charly's Column – VM Detection
To write low-level scripts, as an admin, you need to know whether you are currently on a physical or a virtual machine. Charly finds out with a couple of clever hacks.
Of the systems I work on, about 90 percent are virtualized and 10 percent are legacy hardware servers. For many jobs, this makes no difference, but when I write scripts that call or change hardware-related functions, I need this information.
If I have root privileges on the system and am also allowed to retroactively install software, the problem can be solved very quickly. I install either Facter [1] or virt-what
[2]. Facter provides extensive information about the system's hardware, much like lshw
, and is actually overkill for answering the "virtual or not" question. Calling facter virtual
returns the virtualization platform as the answer, such as vmware
or kvm
. The same result is returned by a call to virt-what
. If I don't need the power of Facter elsewhere, I prefer the leaner virt-what
.
If I have root privileges but am not allowed to install software (for example, because of restricted repositories), there is another possibility. The command
dmidecode -t system
gives me the desired information (Figure 1).

But what if I don't have root privileges on the system? There are solutions for this, too, even several of them. The first is the command:
dmesg | grep DMI
On a VMware guest, the output looks like the second line of Listing 1. If I run the same command on a physical server, I usually see some information about the server model at this point (line 4).
Listing 1
Virtual or Physical?
01 $ dmesg | grep DMI 02 [ 0.000000] DMI: VMware, Inc. VMware Virtual Platform/440BX Desktop Reference Platform, BIOS 6.00 05/28/2020 03 [...] 04 [ 0.000000] DMI: HP ProLiant DL320e Gen8, BIOS J05 12/10/2012 05 06 $ cat /proc/scsi/scsi 07 Attached devices: 08 Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00 09 Vendor: QEMU Model: QEMU HARDDISK Rev: 2.5+ 10 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05 11 [...] 12 Attached devices: 13 Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00 14 Vendor: ATA Model: SanDisk SSD PLUS Rev: 00RL 15 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Another possibility is the command:
cat /proc/scsi/scsi
On a virtualized system, I would see output like that shown in lines 7 to 10 of Listing 1. The physical system, on the other hand, again responds with information about the hardware (starting in line 12).
There are quite a few other possibilities, but whenever it is technically possible, I use virt-what
. It doesn't get any faster or easier than that.
Infos
- Facter: https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter
- virt-what: https://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-what/
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