As the subject says, I've got VMWare Workstation 9 (just upgraded my VMWare Workstation license today - if this doesn't work, I'll be out $120 for no good reason) installed on a Windows 7 64-bit host. The host has an Intel Q9550 CPU (still considered a high-end CPU even four years later on CPU benchmarks), 8GB RAM, a decent video card, 1.5TB internal hard drive storage (+ an additional 3TB external). Basically not a slouch - boots and runs everything fast. The host system plays every video game I've ever thrown at it at max settings - with the obvious exception of...Crysis...old-and-crusty jokes are still funny! Har har. Anyway, I also develop software on my computer, so installing Windows 8 on it is a no-go unless I want to accomplish absolutely nothing for the next month or so and the same goes for upgrading the hardware. I don't really feel like I need to upgrade my hardware - especially since the only Windows Phone development I want to do is effectively a slightly fancier "Hello World" style program. I figure throwing Win8 on a 6GB RAM, 60GB HD virtual machine in VMWare should be sufficient since the Windows Phone 8 SDK requires Win8.
Unfortunately, I'm running into issues with "Hyper-V" (a dumb name for a hardware extension). The prerequisites for the Windows Phone 8 emulator are driving me nuts. I don't have a Core i3 or newer CPU on hand nor feel like there is anything to be gained by that other than being able to do this one tiny project - NOT worth it, especially financially. I read somewhere that VMWare Workstation 9 would work even on hardware that didn't support Hyper-V. It made sense to me because VMWare Workstation emulates stuff and could easily emulate missing hardware extensions in pure software. Apparently not? The option to install Hyper-V in the Win8 machine is grayed out.
What do I need to do to get this to work on my existing hardware?