How to fix: "The Windows Phone Emulator wasn't able to create the virtual machine: Generic failure" under VMWare Fusion 4.1.4
I use an iMac at home, so any Windows development is done in a Windows 8 virtual machine running under VMWare Fusion 4.1.4.
I ran into a problem this evening when playing around with some Windows Phone 8 development and thought I'd share the solution. It turns out the default Fusion configuration doesn't support the hardware assisted visualization (Hyper-V) that the Windows Phone SDK Phone Simulator uses.
Not to worry, just do the following (works for me under 4.1.4).
- Shutdown the virtual machine.
- From the Virtual Machine Library Ctrl-Click on the virtual machine's icon and select Show in finder.
- Ctrl-click on the vm's bundle under Finder and click Show Package Contents.
- In there you will find a .vmx file, this is the virtual machine's configuration file. Open this in your favorite editor.
- Add the following two lines to the end of the file:
vhv.enable = "TRUE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"
- Save the file, restart your VM and the Phone Simulator will work fine.
NB: My VM has two processors, I haven't tried this on a single process VM yet.