How to check a machine is physical or VMware virtual machine

Run command

• dmidecode | grep -i vmware
• If it is a physical machine, it won't return any data
• If it is a VMWare Virtual machine, you will get output like

        Manufacturer: VMware, Inc.
        Product Name: VMware Virtual Platform

• What is dmidecode ?

Dmidecode reports information about your system's hardware as described in your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard. This information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI, ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial, parallel, USB).

Beware that DMI data have proven to be too unreliable to be blindly trusted. Dmidecode does not scan your hardware, it only reports what the BIOS told it to.

Dmidecode is known to work on the following systems:

• Linux i386, x86-64, ia64
• FreeBSD i386, amd64
• NetBSD i386, amd64
• OpenBSD i386, amd64
• BeOS i386
• Cygwin i386
• Solaris x86
• Haiku i586

Refer: http://www.nongnu.org/dmidecode/

How to expand vmware disk space?

You can expand vmware disk space in already installed VM Workstation by using a utility called vmware-vdiskmanager. This utility can be found in your VMWare Workstation installation directory i.e C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation.

Suppose if you want to increase your disk space from 8GB to 15 GB, then run this command as given below

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 15Gb "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.vmdk"

Here the last argument needs to be replaced with your own .vmdk file for which you need to increase it's size.

If every thing goes well the output from above command will be
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
O/P:
Using log file C:\DOCUME~1\guruss1\LOCALS~1\Temp\vmware-guruss1\vdiskmanager.log
Grow: 100% done.
The old geometry C/H/S of the disk is: 1044/255/63
The new geometry C/H/S of the disk is: 1958/255/63
Disk expansion completed successfully.

WARNING: If the virtual disk is partitioned, you must use a third-party
utility in the virtual machine to expand the size of the
partitions. For more information, see:
http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1647

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Make sure you logged out from your workstation when you execute this command.

For more help run "vmware-vdiskmanager -help"