Running Windows Phone emulator in a Windows 8 VMWare VM

I created a Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit VMWare VM using VMWare Workstation 10 for developing Windows Store application.  Since Microsoft is pushing for univserial app between Windows phone and Windows Store (tablet), so I am planning on doing my apps that way.  However, I got into problem starting Windows Phone 8.1 emulator with Visual Studio 2013.  

At the end, this post helped solving my problem.  The key steps are:

- In my VMWare VM setting, enable "Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or ARM-V/RVI" option.

- At the end of the vmx-file of my VM, add the following 2 lines:

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"
mce.enable = "TRUE"

with that, I have Windows Phone emulator running properly.  I can even experience touch on Windows Phone when using my iPad with Microsoft Remote Desktop app.

Using remote desktop to connect to a VM

I can't believe that this problem caused me to fustrate and despress for hours. but the good thing is that eventually I got the problem resolved.

So here's what happened:  I have VMWare Workstation 10 installed on a new machine with a static IP address, and I use it as a closet server.  If the VM is a Windows 7, I can use Microsoft Remote Desktop to access it.  But if the VM is a Windows 8 or Windows Sever 2012 R2 VM, then the remote desktop doesn't work.

I was confused and kept trying different options.  And then I found that if I turned off Firewall, the connection works.

Eventually I found out that all I need to do is change Firewall setting to let "Public" access of remote desktop "on".  It seems like that the VM on my closet machine things that access that VM thru remote desktop on another machine in the same network is still consider "public" because of how VMWare route virtual network packet.

At least I got it working.