How to differentiate a VM from a physical machine

My company wanted to apply a policy to Virtual machines to change the screen saver to the blank one. Makes sense right? Why waste shared CPU cycles on a screen saver nobody is ever actually going to see because the machine has no screen?

The issue was, how to differentiate a VM from other machines. (Personally, I would just have forced a blank screen saver on a 10 minute idle timer on everything and save a little money on the energy bills. You then create an exception group in Active directory, give it deny apply permissions on the policy and put computer accounts of machines that must always have the display running such as wall monitors for call queues or network monitoring, etc in the exception group..... but I digress from the topic at hand.)

So to get back to the topic, how can we differentiate a VM from a physical machine? A little walk through WMI Explorer gave me the answer. A WMI query:

Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE Manufacturer LIKE "VMWare%"

Add that as a filter to your GPO and it'll only apply to VMWare machines.

"What about Microsoft Virtual Server?" I hear you ask. I don't know. We don't use them, but I suspect if you look through WMI, you'll find a similar marker that can be used to identify them.

It's also worth noting that the LIKE filter in the statement will only work on XP and later machines.

Cheers,
Sean

VMWare View Client Silent Installation

I've been having some trouble figuring out how to prevent VMWare View Client from rebooting a machine upon completion of a silent installation. The standard /norestart switch that you normally pass to msiexec simply results in an error.

In the end, I found two answers. One answer was to perform an administrative installation of the product. Then, you are able to call an installation using the msi file directly and use the normal msiexec command line parameters.

msiexec /qn /norestart /i "VMware View Client.msi" ADDLOCAL=Core DESKTOP_SHORTCUT=0 QUICKLAUNCH_SHORTCUT=0

The second, simpler answer was to pass the property REBOOT=ReallySuppress:

VMware-viewclient.exe /s /v"/qn DESKTOP_SHORTCUT=0 QUICKLAUNCH_SHORTCUT=0 REBOOT=ReallySuppress"

Cheers,
Sean