5/26/2020 How to Install Android on VMware: A Step-by-Step Guide

NAKIVO Blog > VMware Administration and Backup > Installing Android on VMware ESXi: A How-To Guide

November 26, 2019 by Michael Bose

Installing Android on VMware ESXi:

A How-To Guide
Android is a very popular and prolific operating system on mobile devices such as
smartphones and tablets. Most of the time, there is no practical reason to install
Android on a physical computer, but there may be some cases when you need to
run Android on a virtual machine (VM), for example, when developing applications
for Android and testing them. Fortunately, you can install Android on VMware
Workstation, VMware Player, VMware ESXi, and VirtualBox. Once you install Android
on VMware Workstation or ESXi, you will get all features available for Android
installed on a smartphone. The advantages of using an Android VMware VM include
the possibility of creating snapshots and cloning a VM during the development or
testing process. Today’s blog post explains how to install Android on VMware ESXi
step by step with screenshots.
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Prepare Your Environment

Android 8.1 and VMware ESXi 6.5 managed by vCenter 6.5 will be explored in
today’s blog post. You can read how to install ESXi, configure ESXi and deploy
vCenter in our blog posts, including the blog post about VMware home lab. You can
create an Android VMware VM on a standalone ESXi host without vCenter. If you
need to install Android on VMware Workstation to use a VM on a personal
computer, you can use the algorithm explained in this blog post since it is nearly
the same for both VMware ESXi and VMware Workstation.

Download the Android Installer Privacy - Terms

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First, download the Android installation image. In this example, we are using the 64-
bit version of Android Oreo (the third release). While the ARM and ARM64
architecture is used on most smartphones and tablets, the image applied in this
example is ready for devices using the x86-64 architecture. You can also see all
available images for different architectures on the official web site of the Android
project.

Create a New Virtual Machine

Open VMware vSphere Client in a web browser, go to Storage, select a datastore
connected to the ESXi host on which you plan to install the VMware Android VM,
select the Files tab, and upload the installation ISO image to the selected datastore
(click Upload Files and select the needed file). In this example, the android-x86_64-
8.1-r3.iso file is uploaded to the SSD2 datastore that is connected to the ESXi host
whose IP address is 10.10.10.74.

Go to Hosts and Clusters in VMware vSphere Client, select the necessary ESXi host
(10.10.10.74 in this case), click Actions and in the displayed menu, hit New Virtual
Machine.

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The New Virtual Machine wizard is opened.

1. Select a creation type. Choose Create a new virtual machine. Click Next to
continue to the next step.

2. Select a name and folder. Enter a name for the new virtual machine, for example,
Test-Android. Select a datacenter and a VM folder in vCenter as a location for the
VM.

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3. Select a compute resource. Select the destination ESXi host on which a VMware
Android VM must be run. In our case, we are using the 10.10.10.74 ESXi host.

4. Select storage. Select a datastore in which to store the configuration and disk files
of the Android VMware VM. You can leave the default value for the VM storage
policy. If you see the compatibility checks succeeded message, go to the next step
of the wizard.

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5/26/2020 How to Install Android on VMware: A Step-by-Step Guide

5. Select compatibility. Select the required hardware version for your Android
VMware VM. The higher the VM version you select, the better VM performance you
get. The newest VMware features are available for the latest hardware versions of
virtual machines. The Android version that is installed on VMware ESXi in this
example is compatible with ESXi 6.5 VM hardware version. Hence, ESXi 6.5 and later
is selected as the virtual hardware version.

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5/26/2020 How to Install Android on VMware: A Step-by-Step Guide

6. Select a guest OS. A selected guest operating system allows the wizard to provide
the appropriate default VM settings for installing an operating system. As Android is
based on a modified Linux Kernel version, you can select Linux as the guest OS
family. The guest OS version may be selected as Other 3.x or later Linux (64-bit). If
you wish to install a 32-bit version of Android on a VMware VM, select the
appropriate (32-bit) version of the guest OS.

7. Customize hardware. Configure hardware for the virtual machine. Edit the
following settings for your Android VMware VM.
CPU: 1 (1 CPU, 1 core)
Memory: 2 GB
New Hard Disk: 8 GB (or more)
In the New CD/DVD Drive settings, select the Datastore ISO file option in the drop-
down menu, select the Android ISO installation image file (android-x86_64-8.1-r3.iso
that was uploaded to the ESXi datastore in this case), and tick the Connect At Power
On checkbox. Other settings may have default values.

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8. Ready to complete. Check your settings, and if everything is correct, hit OK to

finish the new Android VMware VM creation.

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5/26/2020 How to Install Android on VMware: A Step-by-Step Guide

Install Android on VMware ESXi

After creating a new virtual machine, power on the VM and boot from the virtual
ISO image (android-x86_64-8.1-r3.iso) you selected to use by a virtual CD/DVD drive
during the Android VMware VM creation.
Once the VM has booted from a virtual DVD disk, on the boot screen, select the
third option with the arrow keys: Installation – Install Android-x86 to harddisk. Then
press Enter to boot.

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Choose Partition. When the Android installer is loaded, on the Choose Partition
screen select Create/Modify partitions and hit OK.

Confirm. Select No when you see the “Do you want to use GPT?” question.

The cfdisk utility is now opened. Select New to create a new disk partition.

Select Primary to create a primary partition. Privacy - Terms

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Set all available space of the 8-GB virtual disk to be used as a partition to install
Android on VMware.

After creating a new partition, make the partition bootable. Select the partition,
navigate to the Bootable option, and press Enter.

When the Boot flag is set for the partition, write changes to the disk. Navigate to the
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Write option and press Enter. After that, you will see the question: Are you sure you
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want to write the partition table to disk? (yes or no)

Type yes and press Enter.

Now the partition has been created. You can quit the cfdisk by selecting the Quit
option.

Now on the Choose Partition screen, you can see the created 8-GB partition. Select
this partition and hit OK to continue.

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Choose filesystem. Select ext4 as a filesystem to format the sda1 partition created
during the previous step.

Confirm. Select Yes to confirm that you want to format the sda1 partition.

Do you want to install boot loader GRUB? Hit Yes.

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When you see the next question (Do you want to install /system directory as read-
write?), select Yes.

Congratulations! Android-x86 is installed successfully. Hit OK to reboot the machine.

Once the Android VMware VM has been rebooted, you will see the GRUB boot
menu displayed. If you do nothing, the first (highlighted) boot option automatically
gets selected, but Android won’t boot correctly. You should be able to see only the
command prompt.
In order to fix this issue, select the first boot option and press e to edit the boot
commands before booting.

After that, you can see existing boot commands in the boot sequence. Select the
upper item as shown on the screenshot below and press e once more to edit the Privacy - Terms

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boot command for GRUB.

Edit the string and change quiet to nomodeset xforcevesa

Finally, your boot command for GRUB must be:
kernel /android-8.1-r3/kernel nomodeset xforcevesa root=/dev/ram0
androidboot.selinux=permissive SRC=/android-8.1-r3

After editing the boot command, press Esc to exit back to the boot menu. Select the
first boot option that you have edited and press Enter to boot.

Now the Android VMware VM is booted and you can see the graphical user
interface of Android. Select your preferred language and hit Start. In this
walkthrough, English (United States) is used.
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Connect to Wi-Fi. Android is intended for use on mobile devices that don’t have a RJ-
45 Ethernet port and are dependent on a wireless network connection. For this
reason, Android doesn’t determine wire networks. Click See all Wi-Fi networks
anyway, since the network connection is essential for the majority of applications
developed for Android.

On the next screen, you should see the VirtWiFi network. This is the name of your
network to which a virtual Ethernet controller of your Android VMware VM is
connected. You can try to use a USB Wi-Fi adapter and connect the adapter directly
to the VM as explained in our blog posts about installing Kali Linux on VMware and
VirtualBox hypervisors. To do this, insert a USB Wi-Fi adapter to the USB port of a
physical computer running a VMware hypervisor (VMware ESXi or VMware
Workstation) and use the USB pass-through feature.

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Configure Date & time, user name, and log in by using a Gmail account, configuring
Google services options if needed. After passing all steps of the Android
configuration wizard, you will reach the main interface of Android.

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Edit GRUB Configuration

As you recall, we have edited GRUB configuration to boot the Android VMware VM.
However, the edited settings are not saved after the VM reboot. Let’s make the boot
loader configuration changes permanent by editing the GRUB configuration to
make edited settings permanent.
After loading Android, press Alt+F1 to open the console. In the console, run the
commands.
Create a directory to which a virtual disk will be mounted:
mkdir /mnt/sda
Mount the virtual disk to the created directory:
mount /dev/block/sda1 /mnt/sda
Edit the GRUB bootloader boot menu with the text editor vi:
vi /mnt/sda/grub/menu.lst
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Much as you have done before, edit the first boot option and change quiet to
nomodeset xforcevesa
After editing, the first boot loader option string must appear as the following:
kernel /android-8.1-r3/kernel nomodeset xforcevesa root=/dev/ram0
androidboot.selinux=permissive SRC=/android-8.1-r3
Press Esc, then type :wq to write changes to the file and quit.

After that, you can reboot the Android VMware virtual machine and Android should
boot successfully without manual manipulations. Disable the sleep mode. You can
configure the sleep mode by going to Setting > Display > Sleep. You can also enable
graphics acceleration (Accelerate 3D graphics) in the VM settings. Notice that there
are no VMware Tools compatible with the Android operating system.

Conclusion
Deploying an Android VMware virtual machine may be useful for software
development and testing. As Android is optimized for devices with a touch screen,
using this operating system on a desktop is not a practical option. Today’s blog post
has explained how to install Android on VMware ESXi. The installation algorithm is
quite simple – you need to download the ISO image, create a new VM, boot the
Android installer from the ISO image mounted to the VM, create a new bootable
partition on the virtual disk, and install the Android operating system. Android is
provided on mobile devices whose vendors collaborate with Google. When you
have an Android VMware VM, you can back up that virtual machine to different
backup repositories including Google Cloud. To learn more, be sure to read the blog
post about how to back up VMware VMs to Google Cloud.

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