Looks like it's been a while since anyone has commented on the subject, and we've recently purchased the software. So now's a great time to open the discussion back up on this.
We purchased Bloomberg Professional, complete with their Bloomberg Keyboards and all. There's been some debate between us, licensing, and tech support as to whether or not we can legally run this in a VMware environment. In our tests, we've proven that the software works. We've yet to receive the keyboards, but we aren't anticipating any issues here. The only issue we have is with the deployment of licenses.
Bloomberg is telling us, all legal issues aside, for this to work in a VMware environment we must have some level of persistence for the user profile. The reason for this is because license information gets updated in the registry during the software's activation and at periodic intervals while it runs. If persistence is not enabled, we would have to reactivate the software each time a machine is refreshed (which would require a call to Bloomberg) or capture the registry key before the machine is refreshed. We tell Bloomberg we do not want to use persistence since this is a student lab, and we prefer to allow students to refresh machines with a reboot if needed to allow some level of self service if a machine is rendered unusable by the student population. Bloomberg has been less than helpful in finding a resolution to making the software fit our environment.
So aside from writing a custom service to manage the registry keys for each licensed machine and archive/restore these from persistent disk in some other location as needed, has anyone come to a resolution that allows the Bloomberg software to run in a non-persistent VMware lab environment without licensing headaches? For us, we will be deploying in kiosk mode, logging in via the MAC address of our Wyse P25 thin clients. If we can't come to a resolution, we will most likely deploy this as a persistent pool and store the license under each user's login.
Thoughts or comments from those of you who have dealt with this?
Thanks,
Jonathan