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.

References

• How to fix: “The Windows Phone Emulator wasn’t able to create the virtual machine: Generic failure” under VMWare Fusion 4.1.4
• How to run Hyper-V on Windows 8 inside VMware Workstation 8
• Nesting Hyper-V with VMware Workstation 8 and ESXi 5