Possible sure, it was possible in 2013 itself. I've run android both on Ubuntu in AWS and locally inside Virtualbox (or maybe VMWare). And Eclipse (then) and Android Studio come with a variety of emulators. In all cases, you better have a somewhat beefy dev machine. Macs are more than enough, my wife's cheap Thinkpad can't handle both Studio and emulator.
May I ask which thinkpad you're referring to?
T420, sorry for the delayed response, I had to get home to check.
Not a problem at all, thanks for getting back to me.
did you here about Anbox?
using Anbox, you can run Android apps on linux desktop natively.
Anbox sure is an interesting project, although it doesn't provide multi-VM testing automation (afaik)
You can launch the VMs from the projet on Linux, or access VMs from any modern browser / system through the SAAS version.