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Detecting Whether an Installation is Running on a Virtual Machine Returns True When Ran on a Physical Machine with Hyper-V Enabled

Summary

This article explains why detecting if an installation is being ran on a virtual machine will return true when running on a physical machine with Hyper-V enabled

Symptoms

InstallShield lets you determine whether an installation is running on any of the following types of virtual machines:
  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • A VMware product such as VMware Player, VMware Workstation, or VMware Server
  • Microsoft Virtual PC
To check for virtual machines, you can either use Windows Installer properties, or you can use an InstallScript structure or function. More information on this topic can be found here.

When attempting to detect if an installation is being run on a virtual machine, and the installation is ran on a Physical Machine with Hyper-V enabled, the wrong value may appear to be returned. That is to say, the installation will think it is being run on a virtual machine even though it is not.

Cause

When Hyper-V is enabled on a physical machine, this enables Hypervisor on the machine. The way Microsoft engineered the Hypervisor, calling this physical machine an image is technically correct. While the "parent partition" has more capabilities, it is running under the Hypervisor on a machine with Hyper-V enabled, and it is seen as a virtual machine.

Workaround

Disable Hyper-V when running the installation.

Additional Information

To help prevent this issue, an enhancement request has been submitted to our Engineering team as Issue# IOA-000083810. Our Engineering team is investigating this issue, but at this moment, there is no estimated time frame for when this feature will be implemented.
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Detecting Whether an Installation is Running on a Virtual Machine Returns True When Ran on a Physical Machine with Hyper-V Enabled