I really like the Xamarin Android Player emulator (https://xamarin.com/android-player). It is hassle free and very easy to setup.
Unfortunately, I have been constantly running into an issue where if I launch the emulator via Xamarin Studio, by attempting to build and run a Xamarin.Android app, the emulator launches successfully, but the IDE never attaches to it, and just keeps displaying the "Starting...." message:
After a bit of research I discovered a workaround that fixes this:
Rename the emulators so that they are alphanumeric with no spaces, and voila, the emulators now launch perfectly fine from the IDE!