UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all,

i am running a guest OS(RHEL 6.5) on vmware, i wanted to find out if there is anyway directly from RHEL OS to find out if my VM is HVM or PVM ?

or can that only be done at vmware layer ?

Paravirtualisation means to be "aware" of being virtualised. A fully virtualised system will, for instance, run a complete network driver against a simulated hardware representing a NIC. A paravirtualised system will "know" that it runs on virtual hardware and skip the hardware-related parts of a driver. This increases the speed and efficiency drastically.

So, yes, there should be a way of telling if you are running paravirtualized. You will probably not be able to tell apart a fully virtualised system from one running natively on hardware, though. This is, in essence, the same thing.

I hope this helps.

bakunin