Windows Phone Emulator inside VMWare Fusion (Hyper-V)

Want to run Windows Phone Emulator inside VMWare Fusion?

The short version

• shutdown your Windows 8 guest

• navigate to your .vmx file

• add the following two lines at the end:

  hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE

  vhv.enable = TRUE

• restart the Windows 8 guest

The long version

System Requirements – Hardware

You need a CPU that includes a virtualization option (Intel VT-x) as well as a Second-Level Address Translation (SLAT), which is called Extended Page Tables (EPT) in Intels case.

Intel’s Core-2-CPUs don’t support EPT, you have to have at least a Core-i-CPU.

If you try to run it on a Core-2-Duo CPU the following message appears:

Error Message on a Core-2-Duo CPU

Apple only offers Intel-based computers, anyway just for completeness: AMD’s equivalent to VT-x is named AMD-V, and the equivalent to EPT is named RVI (Rapid Virtualization Indexing).

System Requirements – Software

• VMWare Fusion 5 (might also work on VMWare Fusion 4, didn’t try it myself)
• 64-bit version of Windows 8
• Visual Studio for Windows Phone 2012

It will not run on the 32-bit version of Windows 8, because you can’t install Visual Studio 2012 on it.

Setup Blocked on 32-bit Machine

 Setup of Guest

You need to assign at least two CPUs to the 64-bit Windows 8 guest. If you don’t do so, there will be the following message:

The Windows Phone Emulator needs at least two CPUs

• shutdown your Windows 8 guest

• right click the Windows 8 VM in Finder and choose ‘Show Package Contents’

• open the .vmx file in a ASCII editor of your choice

• add the following lines:

  hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE

  vhv.enable = TRUE

• restart the Windows 8 guest

Without these changes you can of course try to start the Phone Emulator. But it will give you only the following message:

Generic Failure

Now you can create an app with a few clicks and start it in the Windows Phone Emulator:

Emulator up and running

Happy coding.