Efficient Ops

Jan 6, 2021 · Cloud Computing

Detecting If Your Shell Runs on Physical Machine, VM, or Container

This guide explains practical techniques and command‑line tools—such as systemd‑detect‑virt, cgroup inspection, DMI data, and cloud‑provider metadata—to determine whether a given shell environment is running inside a container, a virtual machine, or on bare‑metal hardware, including scripts for Docker, rkt, AWS, OpenStack and more.