Determine when running in a virtual machine

Question

Is there an official way for an application to determine if it is running in VMWare or Virtual PC (or whatever Microsoft is calling it now)? The code I have seen i

Answer 1

This thread on the SysInternals forums has a couple of answers (in Delphi, of course), including a single IsVM function. I've tested on XP and Win2003 hosted on both XP and Vista in VMWare with good results.

Answer 2

I wrote a series of articles last year on this, with source code. VMware and Wine detection are here. Virtual PC is here. All three of these have pretty iron-clad detection because there are documented callbacks to the hypervisor (in the case of Wine, an extension to a standard DLL). I put up an untested VirtualBox detector (don't have it installed to test with) in the comment section. Parallels might be detectable using a callback also but I don't have it installed. The link for the documentation (which is poor since it's from a security researcher focusing on exploits) but located here if you have it installed and are interested. There's also a PPT here that has some information on detecting Sandbox, Bochs, and Xen. Not a lot of code in it but it might give you a starting point if you have to detect those.

Answer 3

Code Project shows a way to Detect if your program is running inside a Virtual Machine that goes in much detail on how to accomplish it to give a good understanding

Answer 4

There is a WMI way posted here: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/10/27/484479.aspx

I've double checked in an XP image running on Virtual PC, and the value they're testing for is still the same. I won't guarantee what other VMs return here, though...

I've actually got a Delphi program I wrote a couple of years ago to get a list of and change the default printer using WMI, without requiring 3rd party components or anything like that. In case you're not used to working with WMI from Delphi, I can send you a copy so you have something to work off (it's not necessarily Unicode-compatible, though, but it shouldn't be too hard for me to upgrade it if need be).

Answer 5

To determine the machine is physical or VM

dmidecode | egrep -i 'manufacturer|product'

If the dmidecode command not found install the respective rpm.

This is tested under EXSI, VMWARE and hyperv machines.

Answer 6

dmidecode -s system-product-name

Tested on VirtualBox, result:

Virtualbox