Like many Citrix administrators serving the financial industry, I'm sure you have been asked in the past if it is possible to run the Bloomberg fat client on Citrix. One would be inclined to say, sure why not. But when you place a call to Bloomberg support they say its definitely not supported, like many of the market data applications we already have functioning perfectly fine in the farm (eSpeed, Calypso, Reuters, etc...). In the forthcoming document, I'm going to tackle this very issue of running Bloomberg in the Citrix farm and document the most feasible way to do so.

Use Case:

Bandwidth availability constraints at an offshore site have created an opportunity to test Bloomberg. Market data needs to be fast, served domestically here in the States, along with the availability of both Excel 2007 and Excel 2009.

Items:

We have a valid Bloomberg Serial Number and SID.

We have existing isolated Excel 2007

We have existing isolated Excel 2003

We will be hosting Bloomberg in a Citrix XenApp 4.5 farm (rollup 3).

We will be testing Bloomberg in a Citrix XenApp 4.5 farm

What we have tested:

** We were able to successfully install Bloomberg to a Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition server with SP2.

** Server Model/Make: dell proliant dl385 q/ 8 GB memory.

** Server has 4 interface cards and is running OfficeScan 10.5.0.123

Default Directory - c:\blp

Wintrv Directory - C:\blp\Wintrv\WINTRV.EXE

    ** Wintrv.exe version: 2009,9,7,5

    ** Wintrv.exe Created: Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 3:14:12 PM

    ** Wintrv.exe Modified: Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 3:15:06 PM

Notes: After a successful installation, we were able to successfully launch the Bloomberg UI from Citrix XenApp via the 11 Client.

We were also able to use the Bloomberg API in both Excel 2007 and Excel 2009.

Caveat: Although Bloomberg does not allow (not confirmed) or support multiple connections from one icon (one install) there are several things you can do to be both creative and serve your clients.