virtualization.info has just learned that VMware acquired the security vendor Blue Lane Technologies.
The company, popular for its inline patching technology, entered the virtualization market at the beginning of 2007 and completely refocused its effort around the VMware Infrastructure over the last two years.
Like all its competitors, their VirtualShield, is still unable to provide a special integration with the ESX hypervisor and requires a traditional VM-to-VM interaction: the product must be installed inside a virtual machine that acts as a proxy and the virtual networking must be reconfigured to point all protected virtual machines to it.
The advent of the security APIs called VMsafe, that VMware should introduce next year with VI4, would dramatically change the scenario, finally allowing Blue Lane to transparently protect the virtual infrastructure without any reconfiguration.
But this may be no more necessary now that VMware acquired it.
This acquisition confirms one again the extreme commitment of the company in the security space. In the last year in fact VMware started investing in multiple ways in the security space:
- (August 2007) VMware signs an OEM agreement with Shavlik Technologies to use their patching engine into the VI 3.5 Update Manager
- (August 2007) VMware acquired Determina
- (February 2008) VMware announces VMsafe
With Blue Lane VMware reaches nine acquisitions (at least counting the public ones).
The last one was B-hive in May 2008 (its technology will appear in VI4 as well under the name of AppSpeed).
More details about the deal available as soon as possible.