How to install android x86 on hyper v

How to install android x86 on hyper v

Working with mobile device management (MDM) require a lot of testing. With Windows 10 testing is no problem (except those things that demand to be done on a physical device by different reasons), they can easily be run virtual. But when it comes to phones and tablets it have not been that easy. Visual Studio and some other solutions where out there, but they did not come with Store access or they had dependence which excluded Hyper-V from running. Some Emulators runs in a Hyper-V VM with Windows 10, but not on the host itself. So, if you got it to work it was usually slow and painful.

The best solution was to run Virtual Box (or VMWare, but VM’s are usually available for Virtual Box first), and download pre-created VM’s from OsBoxes.org https://www.osboxes.org/android-x86/

After seeing how well Android 7.1 run on a Virtual Box I decided to try to get it to work on Hyper-V again. Hyper-V runs Windows much better and I often work and demo the entire Office 365 and EM+S lifecycle, including synchronise Active Directory to Azure and managing computer and devices with Intune. After some testing I know have stable Android 7.1 Hyper-V and Android 8.1 with some mouse trouble. The Android 8.1 are in a RC version so hopefully there will be a new version fixing this soon. If you need to test out 8, it works with keyboard input.

I did try the same steps on an Android 6, but that one failed to start after a successful install. So, if you need to use version 6 or older of Android you should chose Virtual Box/VmWare or try to figure out a solution (and tell me).

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Running an Android emulator on Hyper-V in Windows 10

One of the announcements that caught my attention at this year’s Microsoft Build conference was that it there is now an Android emulator that has been specifically designed to work with Hyper-V. As such, I thought that it might be fun to work through the setup.

Before I begin

Before I get started, I need to point out that the Android emulator currently only works on the Windows 10 version of Hyper-V. Windows Server is not yet supported, although it seems likely that we will see Windows Server support for the emulator in the near future.

Preparing Hyper-V

To run the Android emulator, you will need to install both Hyper-V and the Windows Hypervisor Platform. In case you are not familiar with the Windows Hypervisor Platform, it is a component that allows third-party virtualization stacks and applications to be used.

To install the required components, open Control Panel and then go to Programs, followed by Programs and Features. Next, click the option to turn Windows features on or off. Now, select the options for both Hyper-V and the Windows Hypervisor Platform. You can see the Windows Hypervisor Platform shown in the image below.

Install the Visual Studio Preview

To use the Android emulator, you are going to need Visual Studio installed on your Windows 10 machine. Because the emulator was only recently introduced, the current release of Visual Studio will not work with the emulator. That being the case, you will have to download and install Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 Preview 1 or higher. You can download the preview here.

The process of installing the Visual Studio preview is really straightforward, although it does require a lot of disk space (nearly 15GB). The one thing that you will have to do during the installation process is to install the Mobile Development with .NET workload. If you’re not familiar with Visual Studio, the installer prompts you to choose which workloads you want to install. Mobile Development With .NET is one of the choices, as shown in the image below. Just make your selection and click Install.

When you click Install, the installation process will begin. Depending on the speed of your PC and the amount of Internet bandwidth that you have available, this can take a while. You can see what the install process looks like below. Incidentally, you will have to reboot once the installation process finishes.

Verify your Android emulator version

If you look back at the previous screen captures, you will notice that an Android emulator gets installed along with the Mobile Development With .NET workload. However, there is a possibility that the workload does not contain the correct version of the emulator. The only way to know for sure is to check Visual Studio and see which emulator version is currently installed.

To do so, launch Visual Studio, and then click on the Tools menu and select the Android command, followed by the Android SDK Manager command. This will cause the Android SDKs and Tools dialog box to open. Go to the dialog box’s Tools tab and locate the Android Emulator. As you can see in the image below, the current version is 27.1.12. At the time this article was written, the current version was 27.2.7, which means that we need to download the newer version and perform an update.

To do so, download the Xamarin for Visual Studio update. Keep in mind that I am working with a preview release, so it is possible that the download link could change. When the download completes, open the file and you will be taken to a window like the one shown below, prompting you to install the update. Make sure that the Visual Studio preview checkbox is selected and click Install.

When the installation completes, close the installer and go back into Visual Studio. Next, go back to the Tools tab on the Android SDKs and Tools window that I showed you earlier. Now when you look at the Android Emulator, the version number should still be the same, but the Status column should indicate that an update is available. Go ahead and click on the Updates Available button shown below.

Click on the button in the lower left corner to install the updates.

Running the emulator

To run the Android emulator, open a Command prompt window and navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\Android-sdk\emulator. Next, you will need to retrieve the names of the AVDs that are installed. To do so, enter the following command:

You can see what this looks like in the image below:

Now it’s time to launch the emulator. Remember that we want to run this on Hyper-V, so we will need to specify the Windows Hypervisor Platform as a feature within the command. We will also need to include the name of the AVD and the partition size. The command syntax looks like this:

Emulator -avd -partition-size 512 -feature WindowsHypervisorPlatform

In my case, the exact command that I am using to launch the emulator is:

Emulator -avd Android_Accelerated_X86_Oreo -partition-size 512 -feature WindowsHypervisorPlatform

There are a couple of things that you need to know about using this command. First, the command line switches need to be entered in lower case if they are to work properly. Second, it is normal to get a couple of warnings or errors the first time that you run the emulator. Here is what the launch looks like in action.

If you have entered the command correctly, the emulator should open, as shown below.

Although setting up the Android emulator involves a bit of work, subsequent uses should be relatively simple. You can even create a batch file or a shortcut to make it easier to launch the emulator in the future.

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Installing Android-x86 on Hyper-V with Windows 8.1 in under 5 minutes

This guide will show one how to install Android-x86 in Hyper-V. We will be using Android 4.3 as our base installation version and using a Windows 8.1 Professional as a host. One great thing about Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 is that Microsoft has enabled a fairly robust version of Hyper-V even it their workstation operating system. The benefit of this is that building development instances is a simple task. In fact, a decently powered workstation or laptop can have multiple virtual machines open at a given time.

Installing Android onto a Hyper-V Virtual Machine

The guide to installing Android on Hyper-V should take only a few minutes to accomplish.

Step 1: Preparing the Hyper-V Host

The first step in getting this to work is to ensure that the host Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 machine has Hyper-V installed. We have a simple Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Hyper-V guide that works with both versions of the desktop operating system. If Hyper-V is installed either on Windows 8, or a Windows Server/ Hyper-V server, then you are all set and can log into the Hyper-V management console.

One major consideration is which version of Android will you run. For this guide we are going to use an Adroid-x86 build. Further, we decided to use an Android 4.3 version. The reason for this is quite simple, networking in previous versions was very painful because Ethernet did not work out of the box. Android 4.3 changed this and Android 4.4 and newer should also. You can get Android from here: http://www.android-x86.org/download

The next step is quite simple, setting up a new virtual machine. You can simply follow the Linux on Hyper-V guide to set up the VM. The major caveat here is that you do need to utilize the Legacy Ethernet adapter which you can find an example of here. The only major difference is that you will load the Android-x86 iso instead of another operating system.

Android-x86 Hyper-V Legacy Network Adapter

Total time for this should be about 3 minutes if using the guides and about 90 seconds if you have ever used Hyper-V before. The good news is, it is simple to get the host setup.

Step 2: Installing Android

Luckily, Android has a fairly simple installation method if one has ever used a text based Linux installer. At this point you can continue to use the LiveCD shown here, but that is not optimal since we may want a persistent development instance. For this guide we are going to install the image to a disk so we will pick the “Installation – Install Android-x86 to harddisk” option. One reason for the above screen capture is that the system will go into LiveCD mode if one does not select installation within 60 seconds. There are a few simple click-through screens which are very obvious so we will skip some of them in the interest of download speeds.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Boot Screen

Of course to install Android we need a drive to install it on. For this, we will go to Create/Modify partitions.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Create and Modify Partitions

That brings up perhaps the most non-intuitive part of the installation, cfdisk. For those unfamiliar cfdisk will format the virtual hard drive so that Android can be installed. Here you can see we are using a vhd that is around 4GB in size.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Select Partition

Here is the command sequence to utilize:

Just before hitting quit the screen should look like the below. It may differ based on disk size but that is OK.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Create and Modify Partitions – New Primary Boot

Now that we have a proper partition sda1 we can now install it by clicking OK.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Select Created Partition

Now we will select ext3 for the file system. There are many other options, but ext3 works.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Select Created Partition and ext3

Once that is complete, we will need GRUB as our boot loader. Click yes.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Install GRUB

At this point you can either reboot or just run Android-x86. Usually it is easiest to just run but rebooting can be good if you wish to make any minor virtual machine tweaks, such as replacing the network adapter with a legacy adapter if you skipped that part in step 1.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Run

Once Android 4.3 boots, you will see the standard Android setup. There are a few caveats, mainly that you will encounter two error messages. The first is that Bluetooth share has stopped. This is fine since we do not have a Bluetooth device in the virtual machine.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Setup – Bluetooth Share

Next, when it comes to selecting Wi-Fi you will get another error message. There is no wireless adapter in the virtual machine so you can click Skip anyway here.

Android-x86 on Hyper-V Setup – WiFi Error

Once setup is complete (you can log into you Google account or create a new one and etc.), you are ready to go!

Android running on Hyper-V

It should be noted some applications from Google Play do not work on Android-x86 which is a bummer. Hopefully with Intel Bay Trail hitting the tablet scene things will soon change and more applications will have x86 binaries. The major gotcha here is that if the screen goes into power save mode, there is no real way to wake it up. I would strongly suggest raising the sleep limit to at least 30 minutes (which can be done through the Settings UI).

That is it! This should have taken no more than 5 minutes for experienced users and under 10 for newcomers. Microsoft Hyper-V is working very well and this is an interesting alternative to either the development Android emulator or a solution such as Bluestacks.

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