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I'm trying to get into Android development in a virtual machine hosted on Hyper-V, but cannot seem to find a way to use HAXM inside the guest OS. Everything I can find seems to be about disabling Hyper-V on the machine that you want to host the Android emulator on.

For reference, the host OS is Windows 8.1 and the guest OS is a Windows 10 preview. I'm using the most recent Android IDE and Java 7 SDK, with the default emulator that comes with those.

Michael Riggs
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You cannot use the Intel Accelerator (HAXM) and Hyper-V at the same time. Basically, both are hypervisors trying to use the Intel VT (virtualization) extensions of your CPU at the same time, and this is not possible.

  • Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor (on bare metal) that takes full ownership of the Intel VT extensions of your processor.
  • Any other type 2 hypervisor (e.g HAXM or VirtualBox) trying to use the VT extension of the CPU will fail or cause a system error

An operating system running in a VM cannot access the VT extensions without the help of the parent hypervisor. HAXM running in a VM cannot access the VT extensions if it runs on Hyper-V. Hyper-V supports nested virtualization, i.e. a Hyper-V in a VM running on Hyper-V, but you may require specific versions of the OS and some time configuring all the stuff. Windows 10 supports Windows Containers but I think you cannot use that technology to run the emulators.

You can use the official Android emulator. This emulator may take advantage of HyperV for improved performance. You must uninstall (or avoid to run) the HAXM. You can connect your development VM to the android VM using its IP address.

Some time ago, the only alternative for running an emulator with HyperV was the the Android Emulators for Visual Studio (that you may use with Eclipse or Android Studio, without installing Visual Studio). Although these emulators can be used nowadays, Microsoft is recommending developers use the official Android emulators.

Finally, if you want to use HAXM, you can configure an additional boot entry in your Windows and use a type-2 hypervisor such as VirtualBox. You can use BCEDIT to select at boot-time if the machine must start with the Hyper-V or not. You must restart your computer each time you want to enable/disable Hyper-V. To create an additional boot entry, you may check here and here

Jaime
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  • as said here https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/82871/how-to-add-new-api-levels-to-visual-studio-emulator-for-android, the proposed Android Emulator for VS is discontinued: "Unfortunately, we have no plans to publish Android images past 4.4. We recommend that you try Google or GenyMotion’s emulator for future images of the Android operating system.". So, it looks like you cannot use both the AVD emulator (because of HAXM/Hyper-V) issues and the Android Emulator for VS for modern API levels (29 for now) while you are on Hyper-V VM. – Andrey Pesoshin May 01 '20 at 15:21
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I tried this once before but I had issues with it. I tried running Android Studio on vmware fusion but the emulator always showed a black screen. LAter I found out the reason which was 'you cannot run one virtual machine on another.'.

The android emulator running with Adnroid Studio is a virtual machine which I was trying to run in vmware fusion so it never worked.

Neel Desai
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  • Hyper-V supports nested virtualization. Basically, when you use an specialized API, the inner virtual machine runs in parallel instead of inside the outer virtual machine. The [Android Emulators for Visual Studio](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/es/vs/msft-android-emulator/) supports this feature and you can run an emulator inside a VM. However, I have not used this feature in a while and Microsoft is recommending now to use the Google official emulators. I do not know if the new Android emulators supports nested virtualization and let you execute the emulator inside a virtual machine. – Jaime May 29 '20 at 14:53