In article 48886F83.6090707@xplanation.com, Paul Bijnens paul.bijnens@xplanation.com wrote:

Tony Mountifield wrote:

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Does anyone know how a program, script or shell user can best determine whether the machine is running on bare metal or is a VMware guest?

This paper show some very interesting tricks:

http://handlers.sans.org/tliston/ThwartingVM*Detection*_Liston_Skoudis.pdf

Interesting link (once I'd removed the * characters) - thanks!

Cheers Tony

Marc-Andre Levesque wrote:

-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Tony Mountifield

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Does anyone know how a program, script or shell user can best determine whether the machine is running on bare metal or is a VMware guest?

Cheers Tony

This script does the trick for me on ESX 3 by looking at the (virtual) hardware description. But it probably is not foolproof.

if ( `/sbin/lspci | grep -qi vmware` ) || \ ( `grep -qi vmware /proc/scsi/scsi` ); then echo "This is a Virtual Machine." Fi

Marc-Andre

Alternatively, grep the output from dmidecode for VMware:

dmidecode | grep VMware

You'll get output from VMware Server, I've not tested with other VMware products.

Tom Brown wrote:

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Does anyone know how a program, script or shell user can best determine whether the machine is running on bare metal or is a VMware guest?

# dmidecode | grep Product Product Name: VMware Virtual Platform

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mmm....

a XEN VPS gives me this:

# dmidecode | grep Product /dev/mem: mmap: Bad address

on 7-25-2008 12:57 PM mouss spake the following:

Kai Schaetzl wrote:

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Tony Mountifield wrote on Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:47:04 +0000 (UTC):

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Does anyone know how a program, script or shell user can best determine whether the machine is running on bare metal or is a VMware guest?

AFAIK, VMWare uses vmnet32 drivers for ethernet and possibly others for other devices as well.

indeed.

# modinfo vmxnet filename: /lib/modules/2.6.18-5-486/misc/vmxnet.ko author: VMware, Inc. description: VMware Virtual Ethernet driver. ...

# dmesg |grep -i vmware hdc: VMware Virtual IDE CDROM Drive, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive Vendor: VMware, Model: VMware Virtual S Rev: 1.0 VMware hgfs: HGFS is disabled in the host VMware hgfs: HGFS is disabled in the host VMware memory control driver initialized VMware vmxnet virtual NIC driver

...

Most of those depend on your installing vmware tools package and their drivers.

Tony Mountifield wrote: | Does anyone know how a program, script or shell user can best determine | whether the machine is running on bare metal or is a VMware guest? |

Obviously from the responses many people have a solution... my question is "Why do you care?".

What is it that you would do (or not do) on a vmware guest that you might do on bare metal?

install VMware tools perhaps?