Lately I’ve been responsible for migrating quite some VMs from a Hyper-V platform to vSphere. One of the applications I migrated started experiencing some intermittent network issue. And sure enough it turned out the old VM was started again. This left me wondering; how can I check what hypervisor I’m running on.
Now with a Windows VM is quite easy. You just open a device manager and check for system devices related related to either Hyper-V or VMware. But I didn’t know how to check this with linux. This is actually a pretty easy thing to do. It’s just a matter of running dmesg and filtering the output.
Without any filters a VM on Hyper-V will return the following output.
And with vSphere things look like this.
If you specifically want to filter the line where the hypervisor is shown simply type
dmesg | grep HypervisorAnd you know for sure what hypervisor your linux VM is running on.
Update
Just out of curiosity I booted a linux VM on VirtualBox. If you just select the line wich says ‘Hypervisor detected’ you might be under the impression that your VM is running on a KVM platform.
So you might want to include the DMI line as well using something like this.
dmesg | egrep 'DMI|Hypervisor'
dmidecode -t System | egrep ‘Manufacturer|Product’
That’s a great tip Jose! Thanks for pointing it out. Much appreciated.
How do you find the hostname of the hypervisor that the VM is running on?
A very useful and practical tip for Linux administrators. I like how the article shows a simple way to identify the underlying hypervisor using dmesg, especially when troubleshooting VMs after migrations. The VirtualBox example is also a good reminder that checking more than one system detail can prevent misleading results.