Windows Phone 8 is based on the Windows 8 kernel and shares plenty of technology with it. The SDK emulator and debugger use client Hyper-V on Windows 8 to run

Windows Phone 8 is based on the Windows 8 kernel and shares plenty of technology with it. The SDK emulator and debugger use client Hyper-V on Windows 8 to run the phone as a guest operating system, which isn't available on Windows 7.