E-mail management provider Azaleos has unveiled plans for a virtual appliance running Exchange 2007 that can sit on top of a guest operating system within the VMware platform.

The company’s model, unveiled Monday at VMworld, provides Azaleos’s OneServer as a virtual machine preconfigured with Exchange 2007 or one or more of the messaging server’s five roles, which include remote client access, transport/routing and unified messaging. The idea is that those roles can be run on virtual machines on a single box in order to alleviate issues of Exchange’s underutilization of a server’s resources.

In addition, the preconfigured OneServer virtual machines can quickly be matched to any hardware platform deployed within a user’s network.

OneServer is a dedicated appliance that provides an active/passive, fault tolerant and clustered Exchange platform for corporate messaging. Coupled with OneServer is Azaleos’s OneStop Subscription Service, which includes round-the-clock monitoring along with maintenance and management of the appliance.

With the virtual OneServer, Azaleos will manage not only the physical hardware but also the virtual machines and the applications, including Exchange 2007, running within them with its ViewXchange Monitoring and SecureXchange Remote Management services.

Azaleos will configure those virtual machines to run on the VMware platform and provide them to customers with VMware infrastructures or let users run the virtual machines on their own hardware using an embedded version of the VMWare server software.

The virtual appliance is set up across two physical servers with a copy of Exchange 2007’s five roles running on each server to provide failover. The configuration also includes one physical storage device.

Azaleos offers a configuration of Network Appliance storage devices and IBM blade servers to support disaster recovery and patching for its OneServer appliance.

“This virtualized environment allows you to eliminate the single point of failure across all five of Exchange 2007’s server roles,” said Keith McCall, the CTO of Azaleos.

Microsoft has yet to offer support for Exchange 2007 in a virtualized environment because it does not offer a virtualization platform that can run the 64-bit server in a guest operating system. The company won’t release that support until Windows Server Virtualization ships in the second half of next year.