Imessage from phone number

Hey guys, I have a mac running on a virtual machine and everything is working great except that I want to send imessages from my phone number via my virtual mac.

I use an android phone, but have an old iphone 4 to allow me to bind my phone number to my apple id. I put my sim card in the iphone 4, bind it, turn it off, take the sim card out, and put it back in my android phone. This works great for about 4 hours then apple automatically unbinds my phone number from my account and I can only imessage from my email address.

Any ideas on how to more permanently bind my phone number to my apple id?

Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing any ideas anyone might have