Off late, I started working on a Cloud security project where I need to detect the type of hypervisor that runs a virtual machine. For experiment, I had setup test environments based on OpenStack cloud platform with KVM as the underlying hypervisor and also standalone KVM with QEMU, Xen and VirtualBox. The idea is to start a virtual machine on top of these environments and see if I can detect the virtualization technology that powers the current VM. Thankfully, it’s super easy.
Note: There are few native Linux commands such as dmesg (analyzing the system log), lshw, dmidecode etc… that helps you to accomplish this job – which I’ll be covering in a separate tutorial.
Here, I’m going to use “Sys::Detect::Virtualization” perl script, which you can download from this link.
How to detect Virtualization type from a Virtual Machine (VM)
Once you have “Sys::Detect::Virtualization” script downloaded from the above link, copy it to a virtual machine and install it as shown below:
[root@vm ]# tar xvfz Sys-Detect-Virtualization-0.107.tar.gz
[root@vm ]# cd Sys-Detect-Virtualization-0.107
[root@vm Sys-Detect-Virtualization-0.107]# perl Makefile.PL Checking if your kit is complete... Looks good Warning: prerequisite ExtUtils::MakeMaker 6.59 not found. We have 6.30. Warning: prerequisite Test::Deep 0 not found. Warning: prerequisite Test::Exception 0 not found. Warning: prerequisite Test::More 0.82 not found. We have 0.62. Writing Makefile for Sys::Detect::Virtualization
Make
[root@vm Sys-Detect-Virtualization-0.107]# make cp lib/Sys/Detect/Virtualization.pm blib/lib/Sys/Detect/Virtualization.pm cp lib/Sys/Detect/Virtualization/linux.pm blib/lib/Sys/Detect/Virtualization/linux.pm cp lib/Sys/Detect/Virtualization/freebsd.pm blib/lib/Sys/Detect/Virtualization/freebsd.pm cp script/virtdetect blib/script/virtdetect /usr/bin/perl "-Iinc" "-MExtUtils::MY" -e "MY->fixin(shift)" blib/script/virtdetect Manifying blib/man1/virtdetect.1 Manifying blib/man3/Sys::Detect::Virtualization.3pm Manifying blib/man3/Sys::Detect::Virtualization::freebsd.3pm Manifying blib/man3/Sys::Detect::Virtualization::linux.3pm
Install
[root@vm Sys-Detect-Virtualization-0.107]# make install Installing /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Sys/Detect/Virtualization.pm Installing /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Sys/Detect/Virtualization/linux.pm Installing /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Sys/Detect/Virtualization/freebsd.pm Installing /usr/share/man/man1/virtdetect.1 Installing /usr/share/man/man3/Sys::Detect::Virtualization::freebsd.3pm Installing /usr/share/man/man3/Sys::Detect::Virtualization::linux.3pm Installing /usr/share/man/man3/Sys::Detect::Virtualization.3pm Installing /usr/bin/virtdetect Writing /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/auto/Sys/Detect/Virtualization/.packlist Appending installation info to /usr/lib64/perl5/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/perllocal.pod
Detect Virtualization using ‘virtdetect‘ command
[root@vm Sys-Detect-Virtualization-0.107]# virtdetect Multiple possible virtualization systems detected: Linux KVM Qemu
You may also run ‘virtdetect‘ on a non-virtualized environment to see what the command outputs.
[peter@non-virtualized-machine ]$ virtdetect No virtualization detected
