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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.

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    Use the "virt-what" command.
    – ewwhite
    Aug 15, 2017 at 15:02

3 Answers 3

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In VMware:

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

In Virtualbox same command outputs VirtualBox

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

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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, 2017 at 15:11
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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.

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