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Determine when running in a virtual machine

Is there an official way for an application to determine if it is running in VMWare or Virtual PC (or whatever Microsoft is calling it now)? The code I have seen is usually a hack that took advantage of some odd behavioral side effect in a specific version of VMWare or Virtual PC.

Ideally Delphi code, but if you can link to an official explanation then I am sure I can convert it.

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Jim McKeeth Avatar asked Apr 22 '09 23:04

Jim McKeeth


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2 Answers

I wrote a series of articles last year on this, with source code. VMware and Wine detection are here. Virtual PC is here. All three of these have pretty iron-clad detection because there are documented callbacks to the hypervisor (in the case of Wine, an extension to a standard DLL). I put up an untested VirtualBox detector (don't have it installed to test with) in the comment section. Parallels might be detectable using a callback also but I don't have it installed. The link for the documentation (which is poor since it's from a security researcher focusing on exploits) but located here if you have it installed and are interested. There's also a PPT here that has some information on detecting Sandbox, Bochs, and Xen. Not a lot of code in it but it might give you a starting point if you have to detect those.

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Marshall Fryman Avatar answered Sep 25 '22 13:09

Marshall Fryman


Code Project shows a way to Detect if your program is running inside a Virtual Machine that goes in much detail on how to accomplish it to give a good understanding

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TStamper Avatar answered Sep 22 '22 13:09

TStamper