Blue Lane, the security provider famous for its innovative inline patching technology, become VMware Technology Alliance Partner and is now preparing to release a security product (probably a special version of its PatchPoint) for VMware ESX Server, as anticipated on the official site.
While Blue Lane interest and focus on virtualization is evident, VMware is expected to unveil security solutions (backup, patching, firewalling, intrusion detection, etc.) at host level for protecting virtual machines since long time, when first papers about the topic have been published (February 2006) and virtualization.info discovered a new product in the work codenamed Integrity (June 2006).
A host-level patching solution is probably the first and most important side benefit customers may obtain from virtualization adoption, which greatly extends its return on investment this way.
A further hint to upcoming BlueLane solution is provided by the company introductory whitepaper Server Security, Patching and Virtualization, which ends with following statement:
PatchPoint is capable of creating a completely trusted domain in which virtual machines can be protected regardless of their state.