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
[...]
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