Unable to create the virtual machine

Question

I was so happy today that I have been finally able to install Windows Phone 8 SDK and try it a bit. I installed fresh new installation of Windows 8 Pro into my virtual machi

Answer 1

The Windows Phone 8 emulator requires hardware Hyper-V support. In particular, it requires second-level address translation, hardware assisted virtualization, and hardware DEP support enabled and to not be ran in a hypervisor(no nesting). If you bought your machine within the past 4 years you should have no problem with these requirements. You can check out this article to see more information about that and how to find if your PC supports it.

Because of these hardware requirements, this means you can't run the phone emulator inside of most virtualization technologies... With one exception: I've been using VMWare 9 which appears to include an "unsupported" feature to allow Hyper-V to work though.. So your only choice for running the phone emulator is to either buy VMWare 9 (or 8 with more configuration) or upgrade a physical machine to Windows 8

The unsupported way VMWare allows you to run Hyper-V inside of a VM is that there is a manual option (hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE”) which basically tells VMWare not to report to the virtual machine that it's running in a VM. Hyper-V checks if it's running in a VM and won't work if it is, so this gets Hyper-V to work past that check. I personally have tested this whole nested-VM thing with the Phone emulator(including before public release), and other than being quite slow, it does work pretty well with no immediate crashes or anything.

There is a workaround for VMWare Workstation 8 as well in an answer below. However, 9 is much easier to configure, so if you have it use this method.

Answer 2

Just as an addition to https://stackoverflow.com/a/13163762/1964969 (top answer at the moment): manually appending "hypervisor.cpuid.v0" key works for VmWare Player 5 as well (the main reason - this software is free for non-commercial use so it's perfect product if you test the waters, just download from VmWare website and install, it's fully-functional).

Slightly unexpected, any of the following amends solve the problem with WP8 emulator:

hypervisor.cpuid.v0="FALSE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0="TRUE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0=""

Yeah, you can apply empty value for that key - but why? Have no idea but it works. I did some notes in my blog as well: http://windowsasusual.blogspot.ru/2013/01/how-to-launch-windows-phone-8-emulator.html

Answer 3

Not enough rep. to comment on the accepted answer, but Microsoft provide instructions specifically for Fusion here. It worked for me, after a couple of reboots of both Mac and VM. I installed W8.1 without Hyper-V support initially and had to install it after the fact ("Turn Windows Features On or Off" in Control Panel), but apart from that no problems. Quite speedy on a 16Gb 2013 MBP.

Answer 4

You need SLAT compatible hardware to run Hyper-V, which is a requirement for using the emulator.

Can you clarify what kind of hardware you're attempting to run this on, and if you have enabled Virtualization in your BIOS settings?

The "Invalid pointer" error just means it cannot connect to the emulator (and/or device).

Answer 5

For me the solution adding line:

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"

I use VMware Player and added the line (hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE")in the .vmx file. My virtual machine with Windows 8 Pro runs the emulator for Windows Phone 8 perfectly.

Answer 6

This works for me

Set RAM to 4g Set at least 2 cores

add to vmx file.

vhv.enable = "TRUE"

hypervisor.cpuid.v0="FALSE"

Goot article http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wptools/thread/ed72010c-321c-4667-97b2-3ff1540e7f87/