How to Detect If The Script Is Running on a Virtual Machine

How to detect if the script is running on a virtual machine?

I will talk specific to VMware and virtual Box Virtual Machines running Linux as guest Operating system.
If you run below command, you will come to know that the underlying hardware is VMware/VirtualBox which certifies that it is a Virtual Machine.

For VMware guest:

# dmidecode  | grep -i product
        Product Name: VMware Virtual Platform

For Virtual Box guest:

# dmidecode  | grep -i product
    Product Name: VirtualBox

"dmidecode" is a linux system command. You can have perl run dmidecode in the beginning of your script and extract the value. If it is a virtual machine then the script should exit without any further execution.

I do not have any other hypervisor at my disposal to get you what above command return on them.

Hope this helps.

How to detect if my application is running in a virtual machine?

According to Virtual PC Guy's blog post "Detecting Microsoft virtual machines", you can use WMI to check the manufacturer of the motherboard. In PowerShell:

 (gwmi Win32_BaseBoard).Manufacturer -eq "Microsoft Corporation"

How to identify that you're running under a VM?

A lot of the research on this is dedicated to detecting so-called "blue pill" attacks, that is, a malicious hypervisor that is actively attempting to evade detection.

The classic trick to detect a VM is to populate the ITLB, run an instruction that must be virtualized (which necessarily clears out such processor state when it gives control to the hypervisor), then run some more code to detect if the ITLB is still populated. The first paper on it is located here, and a rather colorful explanation from a researcher's blog and alternative Wayback Machine link to the blog article (images broken).

Bottom line from discussions on this is that there is always a way to detect a malicious hypervisor, and it's much simpler to detect one that isn't trying to hide.

BASH: Determine if script was called from virtual machine (Ubuntu), or the W10 bash app?

I have used this for a long time successfully:

if [[ "$(uname -r)" == *Microsoft ]]; then
    do stuff
fi

Checking if Python code is still running on VM

So, what you're asking isn't really the right way to do this.

You should develop and deploy your app so that it's enabled/run by Windows either in a VM as you have now or an Azure App Service.

Meaning, build and deploy it so it can just restart after a crash rather than worrying about constantly checking it. Of course, it need to run reliably as well.

And again, Azure Services don't just randomly crash so that's really one of the last edge cases you should be concerned about.

Detect virtualized OS from an application?

Have you heard about blue pill, red pill?. It's a technique used to see if you are running inside a virtual machine or not. The origin of the term stems from the matrix movie where Neo is offered a blue or a red pill (to stay inside the matrix = blue, or to enter the 'real' world = red).

The following is some code that will detect whether you are running inside 'the matrix' or not:

(code borrowed from this site which also contains some nice information about the topic at hand):

 int swallow_redpill () {
   unsigned char m[2+4], rpill[] = "\x0f\x01\x0d\x00\x00\x00\x00\xc3";
   *((unsigned*)&rpill[3]) = (unsigned)m;
   ((void(*)())&rpill)();
   return (m[5]>0xd0) ? 1 : 0;
 } 

The function will return 1 when you are running inside a virutal machine, and 0 otherwise.

How-to check that powershell script is running in Azure

I know this is old but if the goal is to just be able to run the script locally for development then this should work.

if ($env:computername -ne "<EnterYourComputerNameHere>") {
    # Script is running in Azure
    # use Azure Automation credentials
} else {
    # Script is running locally
    # us Local credential process
}
enter code here

#do the remainder of your work

I checked in Azure for specific environment variables. Looks like this would be more appropriate in this case:

if ($env:AUTOMATION_ASSET_ACCOUNTID) {
    "Running in Azure Automation"
} else {
    "Running outside of Azure Automation"
}

I hope that helps a little bit more.

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