Mobile Device Emulator 3.0 on Windows 7 under VMWare ESXi 4.1.0

Question

I'm trying to set up a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional device under the standalone Device Emulator 3.0. The host operating system is Windows 7 Professional 32-bit, running under VMWare ESXi 4.1.0.

Surprisingly, performance is not bad, but I cannot get the emulator/device to connect with the new Windows Mobile Device Center. I've been able to get the standalone emulator to connect on a Windows 7 machine, just not running under VMWare.

I've tried searching through related posts, but didn't see any hints of a successful standalone emulator running under Windows 7, under VMWare.

I don't necessarily need to use the Windows Mobile Device Center (i.e., ActiveSync). I just need to provide internet connectivity to the emulator.

Answer 1

What error are you getting when trying to connect the emulated device to Mobile Device Center?

If all you need is network connectivity, try using the Virtual Machine Network Driver, which unfortunately, is no longer available as a standalone download, but is part of Virtual PC 2007. I used to use Mobile Device Center and "cradle" the emulated device, but I've since switched to the VMNet driver; it takes a bit more initial setup, but after it's set up, you don't have to mess with it.

Install VPC 2007 on some machine (it doesn't have to be the VMWare guest) and you'll find the driver in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Virtual PC\Utility\VMNetSrv. Save a copy of the VMNetSrv directory somewhere, then you can uninstall VPC (I'm assuming that since you have VMWare, you don't actually want VPC :).

Then on the VMWare guest, go to Control Panel > View network status and tasks > Local Area Connection, click Properties, click Install, select Service, click Add, click Have Disk, then point it to the copy of VMNetSrv that you made.

After that's installed, you'll need to configure ESXi to allow the guest to put the virtual NIC into promiscuous mode: in vSphere Client, go to the Configuration tab of the host machine, click Networking in the Hardware section, then get the Properties of the virtual switch. Select "VM Network", click Edit, then on the Security tab, change "Promiscuous Mode" to Accept.

You should finally be able to configure Mobile Device Emulator to use a network adapter :) (File > Configure..., Network tab, Enable NE2000 PCMCIA network adapter ...)