This may seem like a silly question but I have many servers and sometimes we forget when we login if it physical or virtual running on a VMware system. This makes a diffrence when I try to get a console access etc. So I wanted to know before if its physical or VM.

yes I know i can change motd once i get the info or make a list etc.

There are many ways not OS related for me to find this info out. But I was wondering if there was a Linux command that I could use when I ssh to a system to check if its physical or logical?

I have inventory information etc and vm vsphere to check but that can be time consuming if I just want to check something quick.

uname -a or something like that that would tell me would be cool. I am thinking there is no command as Linux really does not care if its running Vm or physical.

Thanx for any info you can give me.

Do VMware's guest addictions create special rc. scripts or dev files? You can try to see if they exist.

First thing that comes to mind ... assuming that you have been installing vmware-tools on the VMs (which is recommended), you can check if /usr/bin/vmware-toolbox exists.

The other option would be to use the "dmidecode" command which converts the system DMI into readable format. So in essence when you run you should be able to tell if your system is a VM or runs on hardware.

HTH

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Depending on the hypervisor, the device names can often indicate a virtual device. /dev/vxd1 in KVM and so on.
Also, if you lshw, it may display devicenames which are obviously virtual.

cool that worked

dmidecode | grep -i vmware

I knew there had to be a way.