What hypervisor is my linux VM running on?

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

And 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.