Virtual Machine detection from guests

re: Virtual Machine detection from guests

John Howard -MSFT — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:25:38 GMT

Henk - generally you use the latest version of the additions regardless of whether VPC or VS. Both work on both platforms. However, it's been a while since I've been working with VPC and VS as I'm in the Hyper-V team now, so I can't be authoritative that it remains the case. I'm certainly not aware of anything which has caused that generalization to break.

Cheers,

John.

re: Virtual Machine detection from guests

Henk Hofs — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:29:39 GMT

Hey John,

I ran the command below on a hyperv guest...

wmic:root\cli>path win32_bios get name

Name

BIOS Date: 05/05/08 20:35:56 Ver: 08.00.02

Virtual PC 2007 gives this though:

wmic:root\cli>path win32_bios get name

Name

BIOS Date: 02/22/06 20:54:49 Ver: 08.00.02

Virtual Server 2005 R2:

wmic:root\cli>path win32_bios get name

Name

BIOS Date: 02/22/06 20:54:49 Ver: 08.00.02

So this will be one way of diffentiating between hyper-v and VPC/VS. Next question though:

Do VPC and VS need different Additions or can the same additions be used for both VPC and VS?

re: Virtual Machine detection from guests

John Howard -MSFT — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:37:46 GMT

Henk - thanks :)

I don't have a good answer unfortunately, at least not one which I've tried. Would it be possible to query the BIOS date from win32_bios as an option and do conditional stuff based on the date that's returned? I confess though, I haven't got a list of what dates are returned for each version. At least the Hyper-V date should be different to VS/VPS (I hope....) (05/05/08 20:35:58 Ver:08.00.02)

Would that work?

Thanks,

John.

re: Virtual Machine detection from guests

Henk Hofs — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:31:12 GMT

Hi John,

first of all, great blog :)

Sorry for the bump in this blogpost, but i'm having a little question :)

I'm currently designing a deployment solution which is gonna install the vm additions automatically when os is deployed on VPC/VServer or Hyper-V. But here's the trick...

Do you know a way how to check if a guest is running on Hyper-V, Virtual PC or Virtual Server. Because the WMI query for manufacturer and model is not working, for all three products it's Microsoft Corporation and Virtual Machine. But because the different products have different additions, I wouldn't want to install the VirtualServer additions on a guest that's running on Hyper-V :)

Thanks in advance :)

mail: h.hofs at loginconsultants.nl

re: Virtual Machine detection from guests

Fraser Dickson — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 18:50:30 GMT

Neat!