Easy way to determine virtualization technology

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have command line access to a Linux machine which may or may not be virtualized. I want to determine what kind of virtualization technology it runs on, if any (VMWare, VirtualBox, KVM, OpenVZ, Xen, ). This isn't a hostile environment: I'm not trying to work against a VM that is trying to disguise itself, I'm diagnosing a flaky server that I know little about.

More precisely, I'm helping someone diagnose the issue, I'm not sitting at the helm. So I have to convey instructions like “copy-paste this command” and not “poke around /proc somewhere”. Ideally, it would be something like lshw: an easily-installable (if not preinstalled) command that does the poking around and prints out relevant information.

What's the easiest way of determining what virtualization technology this system may be a guest of? I'd appreciate if proposals mentioned which technologies (including bare hardware) can be conclusively detected and which can be conclusively eliminated. I'm mostly interested in Linux, but if it also works for other unices that's nice.