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Re: [Xen-users] Best way to differentiate between virtual servers and non-virtual servers



A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

jinho hwang wrote:

As the perspective of the infrastructure manager, not a user, knowing a machine is a virtual machine or a physical machine helps how to manage the machine.

Right, so after all that, you are talking about how you - as the administrator of a machine - determine if it's bare metal (non virtualised) system, or a virtualised system, or is a host for virtualised machines.

I don't know about other virtualisation technologies, but with Xen you just need to look at what's installed.

If the hypervisor is installed, and there's a /proc/xen directory with stuff in it, and Xen commands (eg "xm list") do stuff - then you'll know that this is a host system running under Xen.

If there's no Xen stuff installed, and no /proc/xen directory - then you're likely running on bare metal.


However, you really should not be having to do this. You should **KNOW** without having to go looking around on a machine what it is. If you are working on machines, and your management systems (even just a basic list of what you have or are responsible for) does not give you this information then you need to address that.

Traditionally people would keep "some sort of list" which would say "what is it", "where is it", and "what's the admin/root password". These days that should also include "is it a virtual host or client" - and have an easy way to find out "what virtual machines does this host" or "where is this hosted" depending on whether it's a host or guest.

--
Simon Hobson

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