It appears that VMware quietly bought a little California number last month called Blue Lane Technologies, which, according to its web site, is no longer selling its wares on VMware's instructions.

Blue Lane's stock in trade was securing physical and virtual data centers with "zero footprint, zero downtime and zero tuning."

Six-year-old Blue Lane is evidently supposed to contribute to VMware's projected Virtual Datacenter OS (VD-OS), the current goal of VMware's Virtual Infrastructure.

Specifically that means its proposed Application vService, which moves the security perimeter from the network to the application.

Pre-VMware Blue Lane had a virtual appliance called VirtualShield - developed with VMware - that removed nasty content before it got to the virtual server via a technique called inline patching. It was software-based and worked on VMware's Infrastructure 3 platform and defended guest VMs running on ESX Server hosts.

It protected servers inside the hypervisor including unpatched, out-of-date, temporarily offline and unsupported legacy systems.

The acquisition leaves another start-up called Catbird out in the cold.

Rumor has it VMware paid ~$15 million for Blue Lane on top of the $3 million it already put in the place. Blue Lane apparently brought in $27.1 million in VC over the years.