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Is there a way to know for sure that your remote-ly hosted server is actually a dedicated, and not just a virtual, "faking" to be a dedicated? What are some possible shell commands to run to test this?

inac
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  • Possible duplicate of http://serverfault.com/questions/149877/is-there-anyway-to-know-if-your-supposedly-fully-dedicated-server-is-really-a-vir/ – Andrew Jun 22 '10 at 04:32
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    virtual and dedicated are not mutually exclusive. as well as consolidation, virtualisation can also be used just for quick deployment and to abstract hardware – JamesRyan Jun 22 '10 at 10:22
  • I agree with @JamesRyan. It is (getting more and more) common to virtualize dedicated servers to make the guest OS easy to move around if the hardware dies. – Joe Feb 20 '11 at 08:13

4 Answers4

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"lspci", the unix command, would be the easiest method. It lists the hardware the machine is running on, and if you see things like "Vmware", then the machine is likely not dedicated. However, if the hardware looks like the hardware you are supposed to have, then it's most likely a dedicated machine.

Chris Foster
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Linux or windows?

if Linux:

1: uname -a and check the kernel version - some virtualization software such as Xen will put -xen in the kernel name. 2: type: dmesg and look for traces of vmware, xen, citrix etc, for example my vmware vm shows: [ 16.560987] VMware memory control driver initialized [ 16.560987] vmmemctl: started kernel thread pid=3227

as one example. another exmaple: [ 4.051578] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access VMware Virtual disk 1.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2

in windows check device manager and check the items, some will say vmware disk or things like that.

hope this helps.

Luma
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Also in Windows you can check installed applications for vm-ware tools or equivalent. These are not always installed though

Ally Reilly
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In linux/freebsd: dmesg|grep -i vmware (or xen, kvm, etc)

In windows: Alt+r (run command), msinfo32. Look at the hardware description on the right side.

pauska
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