Best way to determine physical vs virtual

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1

Is this method still the best way to determine if a endpoint is a physical or virtual system?

It seems like there should be an inspector for doing something like this.

https://bigfix.me/analysis/details/2994596

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2

I’m sure it could be improved, but as far as I know it is.

Are you having a specific issue?

3

No specific issue, it just seemed like kind of a clunky solution and not exactly future proof.

I was hoping there was something like virtual of hardware or physical of hardware

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4

It doesn’t account for virtual OS X at all.

5

I use the following Analysis Property relevance, which seems to work well:

Virtual Machine Vendor:

 (if (it = "Microsoft Corporation" or it = "VMware, Inc." or it = "Bochs" or it = "Parallels Software International Inc." or it = "innotek GmbH" or it = "Xen" or it = "OpenStack Foundation") then "Virtual - " & it else "Physical") of (value "manufacturer" of structure "system_information" of smbios as string)

This only works with the assumption that I have all the VM vendors listed. it is possible that a few new vendors have sprung up since I deployed this 2 years ago.

6

This relevance will inappropriately consider Microsoft Surface tablets to be virtual.

Also, the SMBIOS inspector does not work on the Mac.

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I dont know when this was introduced, but in 9.2.5 there is a property ‘Computer Type’ that is reserved. Relevance appears to only make a small improvement by checking for the Surface. As follows:

if ((version of client < “8.0”) or (if (windows of operating system) then (platform id of operating system = 3) else false) or (if (version of client >= “8.2.1078.0”) then in proxy agent context else false)) then “N/A” else (if exists true whose (if true then( (((item 0 of it contains “VMware”) or ((item 0 of it contains “Microsoft”) and not (item 1 of it as lowercase contains “surface”)) or (item 0 of it contains “Xen”)) of ((value “manufacturer” of it as string, value “product_name” of it as string) of structure “system_information” of smbios))) else false) then “Virtual” else “Physical”)

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My more general point is that there is no easy solution to this question and the IBM relevance has some holes in it, as do all of the other suggestions.