Can I use HAXM on a Linux inside VMWare?

Question

I have VMWare installed on Windows 7. In VMWare, I have an Ubuntu Machine with the environment to develop Android applications. My machine has an i7 processor. For the VM, I assigned two processors with two cores and enabled Vt-x. I already followed successfully all the steps in https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/03/12/how-to-start-intel-hardware-assisted-virtualization-hypervisor-on-linux-to-speed-up-intel-android-x86-emulator, but when I start the emulator I can't notice any improvement (I'm not getting the expected confirmation that HAXM is enabled when I start the emulator).

I installed HAXM on Windows and it works just fine but I really need to use Linux for my development environment.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

Answer 1

This is definitely possible now in 2017.

You need:

1. An Intel CPU (HAXM is Intel only)
2. Enable VT-x in the BIOS
3. Enable VT-x in the VMWare Host settings for the CPU and MMU virtualization
4. Enable "Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest operating system"
5. (Windows Server only) Disable Hyper-V
6. A version of VMWare that supports exposing the HV inside the guest OS.
7. Install HAXM on the guest OS

See: https://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8970

With these steps, I was able to start a HAXM accelerated x86_64 Android VM inside a Windows 2012 guest OS under ESXi 6.0.

Note: I had to use a software-based GPU to get the VM to start, but I don't have a capable graphics card in the server, so that may be related to VM configuration/limitations and/or the underlying hardware capabilities of my server.