Solaris 10 virtual - how do I tell physical host?

uname -a reports type Generic so I know its virtual. Assume its an ldom somewhere.

How do I find out what physical host server is?

Not sure that you know it's virtual from that.............

# uname -v

should say Generic_Virtual if it's NOT a physical box.

Also, this Oracle page lists commands that won't work on non-global zones.

Utilities That Do Not Work or Are Modified
in Non-Global Zones (System Administration Guide: Oracle Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Oracle Solaris Zones)

By definition, a local zone has no knowledge of the outside world, i.e., what it is hosted on, so there is no straightforward command that will tell you the name of the global zone or the physical box characteristics. Sometimes you can identify a global zone by comparing MAC address(es).

Search this forum and/or the web for "identify global zone from local zone".

Wouldn't prtdiag give it away? I can't test it now but I thought prtdiag would say something like "Must be run in global zone".

EDIT: I think you can also run /usr/bin/zonename and check if zone name comes back as 'global' or not. Again, this is all from memory.... I have not messed around with Idom so just throwing out what I am familiar with. Hope it helps.

Just ask the admin(s). They should know.

There is no (reliable/supported) way to get it from a virtualized environment by design, whatever the virtualization method.

Most if not all methods can be fooled from the global/control/hypervisor/whatever level, not to mention the information retrieved might be obsoleted on a virtualized environment migrated from one physical host to another, even more when live migration is supported.

1 Like