Windows - Unable to start the Virtual Device – Genymotion

Note

From Genymotion Desktop 3.3.0 onward, it is possible to use QEMU hypervisor instead of VirtualBox. Please note, however, that QEMU requires Hyper-V or HAXM to work, and there are known performance issues on Windows systems.

You are trying to run Genymotion Desktop in a virtual machine, a server or a Cloud instance (AWS, GCP, Azure, ...)

Genymotion Desktop has been designed to run in a physical environment, not in a virtual machine. For this reason, Genymotion Desktop will not work if run in a Windows VM, a Windows server nor a Windows Cloud instance.

For more details, please refer to these articles:

Your hardware does not meet Genymotion Desktop requirements

Make sure that your hardware meets Genymotion Desktop requirements. See What are Genymotion Desktop requirements?

Your Windows version is not supported

Genymotion Desktop does not support the following Windows versions and variants:

Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1
Windows IoT (all versions)
Windows Server (all versions)

Also, Genymotion Desktop is not available for Windows 32-bit.

Windows Defender

The Memory Integrity Core Isolation feature of Windows Defender is known to cause this type of errors. You may need to disable it before using Genymotion Desktop. For more information, please refer to How to disable Memory integrity in Windows 10?

You are using VirtualBox

Every time Genymotion Desktop is run, it calls VirtualBox to verify the availability of at least one VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter. If none is available, it tries to create a new one. Unfortunately, this operation fails on some Windows configurations. To solve this, try the solutions below:

Reboot your PC

Rebooting your PC after having launched Genymotion Desktop for the first time often fixes this error.

Windows security settings

Every time Genymotion Desktop is started, it calls VirtualBox to perform several operations:

verify the availability of at least one VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter
create a VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter if the above fails
list all the deployed virtual devices

These operations require administrator rights to be performed successfully.

To avoid this, we recommend running Genymotion Desktop on a Windows account with Administrator rights (i.e. it is a member of the Administrators group) and lower you Windows security settings.

Note

If you get many User Account Control (UAC) pop-ups prompting for Administrator permission, you may also consider turning them off. For instructions, please refer to this article: Enable or Disable User Account Control (UAC) in Windows

Windows standard user account

There are known issues when running Genymotion Desktop and VirtualBox in a non-admin Windows user account. If it is not possible for you to use an account with full admin rights, please see Can Genymotion Desktop run in a standard user account? for possible solutions.

Fix VirtualBox Host-only interface bugs

On some Windows systems, VirtualBox fails to create a viable host-only interface. Please refer to Windows/VirtualBox - An error has occurred while trying to create a virtualbox host-only network interface for possible solutions.