VS 2015 intern Android Emulator not starting (vmWare 10)

Question

I am running VS2015 CTP6 on a freshly installed and updated Windows 8.1 N x64 VM. Hyper-V support is enabled, hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = \"FALSE\"and vhv.enab

Answer 1

Tweaking Virtual Maschine Settings did the trick for me. I was also trying to run the Android emulator by starting a debug session in VS2015 Community for a Xamarin project. VS2015 was running inside a Windows10 VM based on VMware Workstation 12 Pro hosted by Windows7 on a i7 CPU. I ran into the following error message:

"... The Virtual Machine Management Service failed to start the virtual machine 'VS Emulator 5-inch KitKat (4.4) XXHDPI Phone.andreas' because one of the Hyper-V components is not running (Virtual machine ID ...)."

Everything worked fine after activating the following flags in the virtual machine's processor settings section:

• Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI
• Virtualize CPU performance counters
• (Preferred mode: Automatic)

Answer 2

My emulators disappeared (according to VS) after CTP6 update although all the images, SDKs etc. are still there.

I sorted it with a repair (control panel, programs, vs => modify.) It took many hours do just let it run.

Double check that the VM you are running on has enough memory(emulator will use a lot- and run Procmon to see what VS does and where it fails. Check event log and turn on logging for the VS instance you are using to look for cues.

"The Visual Studio Emulator for Android can't be run nested inside another VM"- is incorrect. My Windows10 VM is happily serving up the emulator for the different platforms and the same goes for Windows 8.1 & 8.

HyperV doesn't seem to be able to support quite yet (AFAIK) but there are other hypervisors you can use such as VMWare player- and from your config edits in the VM I assume you already knew that :)

I'll provide picture proof later (phone only right now so I'll have to edit typos as well later).

Answer 3

The Visual Studio Emulator for Android can't be run nested inside another VM, particularly not a Hyper-V VM, because the emulator itself is a Hyper-V VM (and Hyper-V doesn't support nested VMs). See the last bullet in "Current limitations" at the end of this blog post.