Find out which Hypervisor your Windows 7 is running on!
If you need to determine which virtualization platform is a Windows 7 Virtual Machine (VM) is running on, while, you have no access to any other tools such as, the hypervisor or virtualization manager, you can easily find out by issuing a simple command from the Windows command-line interface.
The Windows Management Instrumentation Command Line (WMIC) utility allows you to determine whether Windows 7 is installed on a VM or physical machine. In case, it is installed on a VM it will also indicate which virtualization platform is being used, such as, Hyper-V, VMware, Xen or VirtualBox among the major platforms.
From Windows 7, open a command prompt with administrative permissions, and type the following command:
wmic bios get serialnumber, version
The above wmic command would return:
- The string VERSION for VMs running on Microsoft’s Hyper-V
- The string VMware for VMs running on VMware’s ESX
- The string Xen for VMs running on Citrix’s Xen, and
- The string VBOX for VMs running on Oracle’s VM VirtualBox
