The setup: MacBook Air mid-2013, 4gb ram. Running Windows 8.1 in Parallels Desktop 9 and Visual Studio Premium 2013 with Windows Phone 8 plugin. Enabled the Hyper-V in Windows Features. When running the Windows Phone 8 emulator the following error message came:
Windows Phone Emulator |
The Windows Phone Emulator wasn’t able to ensure the virtual machine was running:
Something happened while starting a virtual machine: ‘Emulator WVGA 512MB.user’ could not initialize. (Virtual machine ID XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX) The processor topology specified for the virtual machine cannot be supported by this host. For instance, this can happen when the virtual processor or socket count for the virtual machine exceeds the logical processor or socket count for the host. |
This was due to number of virtual processor, even though Parallels recommends only using 1cpu since using more is unstable (unsure if the condition has change in Parallels 9, the source was for Parallels 8 http://kb.parallels.com/en/115211 ). Changing the numbers of cpu to 2 still ran Windows 8.1 fine.
Next up: Memory:
Windows Phone Emulator |
The Windows Phone Emulator wasn’t able to ensure the virtual machine was running:
Something happened while starting a virtual machine: ‘Emulator WVGA 512MB.user’ could not initialize. (Virtual machine ID XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX) Not enough memory in the system to start the virtual machine Emulator WVGA 512MB.user with ram size 512 megabytes. (Virtual machine ID XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX) |
This was due to allocated memory was only set to 1gb. The recommended size is between 512mb – 1524mb, but 1524 wasn’t enough. Setting the memory to 2048mb will prompt you with “are you sure?”. 2gb ram made it work on the MacBook Air virtual machine with Windows 8.1, the Windows Phone 8 emulator will start and run the project now.