Urgent help needed

[romi]

Hi All,

I am using esx server and red hat linux as an os for vmguest.

Now i need a command to execute on vmguest so that it can tell me that it is not a physical machine it is a virtual machine..

In other words is there any way to know that the vmguest is a virtual machine not a physical machine. is there any file , driver which resides on vmguest only?

any thing special to vmguest??

Thanks in advance.

[davidbarclay]

Urgent? I clicked this thinking you had an outage...

Guest: VMtools will be installed, hardware/drivers will match virtual etc

Dave

[beckmana]

Hi,

you can use lspci, if the Display Adapter is from VMware, you know it's a VM.

00:0f.0 VGA compatible controller: VMware Inc \[VMware SVGA II] PCI Display Adapter

[romi]

is there any way to know whether the system is VM or not without installing VMtools ?

[romi]

Are you sure that Display adapter will be always form VMware suppose user configured his vm without using any display adapter ??..

i dont know much about esx configuration so dont know whether VMguest can be configured with some other display adapter or not.

Could any one please throw some light on it.

[JBraes]

The VM-Question would be ; Why do you need to know if the Machine is a Virtual Machine or a Physical.

First of all you should install the VMTools, you could give the server a name that makes it easy to see if it is a virtual Machine.

Check with the MAC address, so create a script tat when you run it will check the macaddress and will post a reply on screen to tell you if the Machine is a virtual Machine or not..

Probably another zillion ways ...

[beckmana]

It is not possible to create a VM without DisplayAdapter,or modify the Display Adapter. Hardware Vendor is always VMware

[romi]

I also think that you r right but can you give me reference of any manual e.t.c

[JBraes]

Romi,

I still don't understand what you want to do ?

We gave you allready a few options (NIC , video) etc..

Tell us what you need, because you wanted to know how to tell the difference between a VM and a physical machine and that question seems answered.

Jeroen

[romi]

Thanks for helping me.

Actually i couldn't get the answer yet. as u suggested giving a name to a system and then finding out through script wont help in my case.

I am explaining my problem again. suppose i got a system completely new to me now i want to execute a command or system call so that i can get some vmware specific info , if the system is VM guest. there must be some way to find it out. like this display driver idea sounds good but as i am new to esx server so dont know whether it is fullproof way to use it or not.

Please let me know if you need some more explanation.

thanks in advance.

[Abaronov]

I think Jeroen already suggested the easiest and pretty reliable way. The NIC address of a virtual machine will start with three vmware-specific octets.

The below is from http://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/esx21admin_MACaddress.html

"We cannot guarantee that a host stays within a specific MAC address range. However, we guarantee that the MAC address never conflicts with any physical host by using our OUIs (00:0C:29 and 00:50:56), that are unique to virtual machines."

I wouldn' agree that the statement is technically accurate (the MAC can be changed to smth outside of this range with some hacking), but in the reality I would trust Jeroen's method almost 100%

In my opinion, he deserves the 'correct answer' points:)

Andrei