I am running Windows 7 Ultimate as my main development machine but thought it would be good to play around with Windows 8 Phone dev kit.  Now you need Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013 which I wanted to install on my VMWare Workstation 8 as a virtual pc.  I created risk of abortion a virtual PC and Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013 installed fine, but when running the Windows Phone Emulator I got the following error:-

Windows Phone Emulator is unable to verify that the virutal machine is running:

Something happened while starting a virtual machine: 'Emulator 8.1 WVGA 4 facts of abortion inch 512MB.admin' failed to start. (Virtual machine ID ...

The Virtual Machine Management Service failed to start the virtual machine 'Emulator 8.1 WVGA 4 inch 512MB.admin' because on of the Hyper-V components is not running (Virual machine ID...

There is a great article on the nokia developer site for VMWare:-

http://developer.nokia.com/community/wiki/Windows_Phone_8_SDK_on_a_Virtual_Machine_with_Working_Emulator

The only bit I was missing was that when I opened the .vmx file I didn't have the following at all:-

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"

So after adding this in and checking all the other settings where on I was then able to boot up the Windows Phone emulator - yippy.