These are the kind of questions that will expand the knowledge base!
Let's have a look at that first question:
"How do you identify if you have logged into a physical linux server or a virtual linux server?"
A truly great question!!!
There are several approaches (linux commands) to gathering information to answer this
question. Let's start with one that most of the community may have been exposed
to: lshw
When lshw is executed, it spits out a lot of wonderful info, but we're only going to
target 2 lines of the output, that will identify the host being either a physical machine
or a virtual machine.
The 2 lines are:
Product
Vendor
If the host is a physical machine, then you can expect to see the name of vendor
that manufactures computer systems (e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, etc.).
I'm running Fedora on a very old laptop (but it still gets the job done very well that I
require), and here's what those 2 lines display:
Product: Dell Latitude E6410
Vendor: Dell Inc.
Executing that same lshw command on a virtual machine (one of the VMs in the
Red Hat Interactive Labs platform), those same 2 lines display the following:
Product: Google Compute Engine
Vendor: Google
Google Compute Engine? Really? I know Google develops a great many things,
but I don't think computer hardware manufacturing is a part of their domain.
When executing the lswh command on a VM, the information that you will see,
obviously, will depend on the virtualization software!
In summary, if the system is a physical machine, then you'll see the name of a
recognizable computer manufacturer. If not, then the system is a VM!!!
Another command that I'll get into in a separate post is the dmidecode command.
A true jewel of a command!
I'll stop here, and let the lshw command serve as the appetizer, and follow it up with
a portion of the entree. Oh, and don't laugh at me about my laptop. I did admit that
it was old
Trevor "Red Hat Evangelist" Chandler
