Running Windows Phone 8 Emulator within VMware Virtual Machine
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Running Windows Phone 8 Emulator within VMware Virtual Machine
Introduction
My development environment is now fully virtualized, and this caused a problem when I tried to do to some Windows Phone 8. Realistically I try to avoid running a virtual machine from within another virtual machine but this is not always an option. For Windows Phone 8 development, the phone emulator that can be used for development runs on Hyper-V within Windows 8 Pro.
My Environment
- VMware Workstation 9
- Host Operating System: Windows 8 Pro
- Guest Operating System: Windows 8 Pro
- Visual Studio 2012
The first time I tried to start up the phone emulator, I got a wonderfully vague error message:
“The windows phone emulator wasn’t able to create the virtual machine: generic failure”
I suspected this was because of me trying to launch a virtual machine from within another virtual machine, so I researched it and found a manual work around for vmware workstation. Simply appending the following line to the *.vmx file for my virtual machine fixed my problem:
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “TRUE”
After making this change, I was able to successfully start the phone emulator via Visual Studio 2012 without any issues.
If you want to read more about this, I suggest checking out the blog posts that I list under References. All contain good information to give you a better understanding of what’s going on and why.