VMware’s project to bring virtualization technology to Android smartphones has locked up a major carrier partner in Verizon Wireless, which will start selling virtualized phones “in the coming months,” VMware announced today.

The technology, known as VMware Horizon Mobile, essentially creates two phones on the same device by installing a guest operating system in a virtual machine, resulting in a work environment that is isolated from a user’s personal environment, applications and data. LG and Samsung have both agreed to build phones containing VMware’s mobile hypervisor.

In addition to Verizon, VMware today said it has signed up Telefonica to sell virtualized phones in Europe, including the Samsung Galaxy SII. The Verizon announcement names LG as a hardware partner, but both Verizon and Telefonica will release devices from multiple Android vendors.

The system requirements for VMware’s mobile hypervisor are not difficult to meet: a 700MHz processor and 512MB of RAM. Phones with hypervisors preinstalled shouldn’t cost any more than they normally would—it’s just another feature that users can enable or ignore as they please. “Your phone comes with a browser. You don’t pay extra for a browser,” Srinivas Krishnamurti, senior director of mobile solutions at VMware, told Ars.

Exact release dates haven’t been announced by the carriers.

Telefonica Android phones will provide the option of having separate data services and two phone numbers on the same SIM card, one for work and one for personal use. It’s not yet been announced whether Verizon will have dual-number phones ready at launch, but one possibility is tying the corporate side of the phone to a PBX system, Krishnamurti says. Even if a phone has just one number, the separate profiles created by Horizon Mobile keep work messaging and browsing separate from the personal part of the phone, and let IT manage the corporate side without touching the personal data.

VMware and partners have conducted enterprise trials with 50 users from 5 businesses to gain feedback on performance and usability, and is conducting more trials next month. VMware has also developed a smartphone management platform for IT shops known as Horizon Mobile Manager, a Web-based product designed to help administrators provision, monitor and manage corporate phone profiles on employee-owned devices. Telefonica will resell Horizon Mobile Manager in a cloud-based service.