Unable to create Android Virtual Device in Visual Studio Xamarin Tools

Question

I have a Virtualbox VM with Windows 10 and

Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017 Preview Version 15.6.0 Preview 5.0 VisualStudio.15.Preview/15.6.0-pre.5.0+27413.0 Microsoft .NET Framework Version 4.7.02558

with Xamarin Tools for VS

Xamarin 4.9.0.730 (c06c7fdd0) Visual Studio extension to enable development for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android.

Xamarin Designer 4.10.53 (0f268fa65) Visual Studio extension to enable Xamarin Designer tools in Visual Studio.

Xamarin.Android SDK 8.2.0.12 (HEAD/413eed680) Xamarin.Android Reference Assemblies and MSBuild support.

Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac SDK 11.8.0.18 (4c56cbb) Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac Reference Assemblies and MSBuild support.

I know that I can't run x86 base emulator in a VM, but what I am trying to achieve is to run an arm base emulator which should be possible as it doesn't need hardware acceleration.

However, trying to create a new AVD (any AVD) always fails. Below some screenshots showing the Android setup and the errors

Finally the Log Report

EDIT: Please note that I am not asking for workarounds or advice (at this stage at least).

• I know that non accelerated emulators are slow
• I know that there are potential workarounds (Android Studio AVD manager, CLI avdmanager...)

I am using a tooling (Visual Studio + Xamarin Tools for Visual Studio) which is supposed to work in a certain way, but it doesn't seem to. Either I am doing something wrong, or there is a bug somewhere. So I expect answers like:

"This is a known issue of ..... and will be solved in a future release of the product" or

"Your setup is incorrect, change to ...." or

"What you are doing is not supported, see ...."

Answer 1

From my experience i wouldn't recommend running any emulators within the VM, try and run the AVD on your host machine and connect it to the VM. Example using genymotion