How-To Run Android Lollipop on VMware Workstation

The smartphone industry is evolving at a higher rate than ever. Everyone has a smartphone and it’s getting harder to live without one. In less than 10 years, smartphones have gone from a luxury to necessity. This evolution puts more pressure on developers to dynamically adapt to the situation and bring in more innovation into the app development space. Thanks to Android-x86 community for releasing the ISO of Android which can be used by developers to run the Android OS on any system, even inside a virtual machine and test/develop it.

In one of my previous posts I had shown how to run Android Kitkat on VMware workstation. There was a lot of good feedback on it. The link for that post can be found here.

In this post I will be showing How To Run Android Lollipop on VMware Workstation. The post is going to be a detailed one, so it will help even someone who is new to VMware technology, to be able to get this up and running in less than half an hour or so.

So at first, VMware workstation has to be downloaded from here

Once the initial setup is done (Which can be found on many blogs). We can continue with creating a virtual machine for running Android.

Below are the steps to create a VM. Launch the Workstation software and click on new Virtual machine.

Start the virtual machine wizard. Select the radio button Custom. Click Next.

Click Next.

Browse to and select the android ISO and Click Next.

Name the machine. I call it Android L. Browse and select a specific folder if needed or just leave the default value.

Select the number of processors. Since this is a test machine i selected 1 processor. You can select the value depending on your requirement.

Select the RAM for the machine. I have selected 512 MB like shown in the below screenshot.

Select the network for the machine. I chose NAT here as I need the machine to replicate the host’s IP settings.

Leave the I/O controller default. Click Next.

Leave the disk type default. Click Next.

Select the disk size as required. Here I have chosen 5 GB. You can either keep a single disk file or split them.

Leave the Disk file value default. Click Next.

And as a last step, review all the settings and Click Finish.

Now the Android ISO will load and the boot menu will appear. You can either run a LiveCD version of android or run the installation.

The next couple of steps is for creating a partition to install android. Select create/modify partitions.

Now once you see the free space, create a new partition by selecting the New option.

Noe select primary to create a primary partition.

Next you will have to select Write which will write the changes to disk.

Now select ext3 or nay partition you require to run the android OS.

It requires you to install a boot loader as there is no default one. Click YES to proceed.

Click Yes to make the disk read-write.

Now the installation starts and will take around 5 minutes to complete.

Next choose a space to create the user data image disk. if you want to dedicate less space you can do so in the next step.

This completes the installation of android. Select the Run Android-x86 to start the OS.

This loads the andoroid OS. It will initially take a while. have patience.

Select a launcher. both the launchers are good. Select one of them and click Just once or Always depending on your preference.

Next comes the welcome screen.

Next the menu page.

Below is the screenshot of the version of the installed android.

So this completes the installation of android lollipop on VMware Workstation 11. Drop a comment once you get yours up and running.