How to determine if Linux OS is on virtual hardware or physical hardware?

Question

From a Linux OS, is there a way to determine if the OS is running as a guest OS on a virtualized VMware environment as opposed to running directly on non-virtualized/bare metal/physical host? In my case it is either VMware or not, but I am also interested the more general question of whether the OS is on physical hardware or virtualized hardware of any sort.

Answer 1

In VMware:

# dmidecode --string system-product-name
VMware Virtual Platform

In Virtualbox same command outputs VirtualBox

Answer 2

On newer systems, the command "lscpu" give's you the information you need, inclusive which hypervisor the VM is running on.

Answer 3

You can look at the output of the following:

• virt-what
• cat /proc/cpuinfo
• dmidecode
• lspci
• lshw
• hwinfo

Any of these will print various things that should point to if and what virtualisation-platform is being used.