I agree. The lack of support in finding a working solution is a definite red flag, but I think the reason there's a lack of support is because the department that purchased the software bypassed us and purchased before confirming with us that the software would work in our environment. So now we have purchased software that we have to alter our environment to fit, instead of our preference of setting requirements and policies for any software prior to purchase. It will actually be easier on our team if we set this up as dedicated persistent desktops because we work with the initial install and deployments. The headache will come when each month, our lab admins have to reinstall the software (per Bloomberg's requirements) to stay in compliance with Bloomberg's licensing. We've received mixed reports on this reinstall. One rep told it was every three months. Another told us it was every month with a three month grace period. In any event, our lab admins will most likely refresh the pool at this point along with the new software, which means licensing information will have to be captured from each VM, archived, and restored. For now, it's only 12 machines. So other than being a minor inconvenience to someone each month, it's not a massive undertaking. However, we would like to find a better solution in case this grows.
For licensing, it is per named user. The licensing is stored with the user's profile and cannot be shared by other profiles on a VM. We will be licensing the AD accounts that we created for each of the 12 machines logging in via kiosk mode. So although this is a lab environment with many students that could use each thin client, each thin client has a singular AD account set up to Auto-login for any student that uses the thin client. Students do not have individual AD accounts. Because of this, we prefer non-persistent so that if and when one student messes up a VM, it can be rebooted and automatically refreshed to it's original state. Our lab admins have accepted that with the purchase of this software, this functionality will no longer be available, and there will be a slightly longer time to recover a VM since we will have to do persistent dedicated VMs and manually manage the refreshes and recovery of licensing.
I have yet to see any official documentation from Bloomberg or the department on what was actually purchased, so some details may not be 100%. I've been told we will not receive any licensing information prior to the installation of the software. After installation we will call Bloomberg with a code from the installation and our site name, and they will provide an activation code. This will have to be done for each installation under each user's account. This is different from our test licenses where we received all the information we needed, including activation codes, via email. If the information sounds a little off, that's because it is. We're getting conflicting reports from the sales representatives, tech support, and everyone in between. So much of my information is taking what we've heard from all of the above and doing our own testing to see what seems to be the case. We still have quite a few uncertainties that won't iron themselves out until we start to deploy the production licenses. We plan to start this process this week after we receive the specialized Bloomberg keyboards and test that they work as expected.
