virt-what - detect if we are running in a virtual machine

virt-what is a shell script which can be used to detect if the program is running in a virtual machine.

virt-what supports a very large number of different hypervisor types, including common open source hypervisors (KVM, Xen, QEMU, VirtualBox), mainframe systems like IBM Systemz, LPAR, z/VM, hardware partitioning schemes like Hitachi Virtage, proprietary hypervisors like VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V and much more.

virt-what is already packaged in Fedora (13+) , Red Hat Enterprise Linux (5.7+ and 6.1+) , Debian, Ubuntu, ArchLinux and Gentoo, and it can be compiled from source on just about any Linux.

How it works

The program prints out a list of facts about the virtual machine, derived from heuristics. One fact is printed per line.

# virt-what xen xen-domU # virt-what kvm # virt-what (nothing printed ⇒ baremetal)

If nothing is printed and the script exits with code 0 (no error), then it can mean either that the program is running on bare-metal or the program is running inside a type of virtual machine which we don't know about or cannot detect.

Caveat emptor!

Most of the time, using this program is the wrong thing to do. Instead you should detect the specific features you actually want to use. (As an example, if you wanted to issue Xen hypervisor commands you would look for the /proc/xen/privcmd file).

Download

Source tarballs are available here.

Community, discussions, feedback

virt-what is actively developed by Red Hat and the community. If you have questions, problems, patches or feedback on virt-what then go to the virt-tools mailing list, or hop over to our IRC channel #virt on OFTC.

Documentation

The virt-what manual page.

Source code repository

Source code is now in git (thanks Jim Meyering).

git clone git://git.annexia.org/git/virt-what.git

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