Question

I am trying to run an application called vdbench on my windows2008R2 which is a VM. However, the application does not have 64 bit support and can be only run with 32 bit version of Java. I am trying to understand if I can install the 32 bit JRE and run the application on the windows2008R2 64 bit server? I tried it but the application is not able to run saying ‘java’ is not recognized as a program. I am wondering if I need to map my windows2008R2 to run the specific 32bit version of JRE?

Answer 1

You need to do nothing except install the 32-bit JRE / JDK whatever your requirement.
I do this all the time. The only real reason to use the 64-bit version is if you application needs to be able to access more than 4GB of RAM (or some programmatic lib dependency)

Make sure you install the 32-bit version and point the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the install dir so if you install JRE 1.6 it JAVA_HOME should be something like
C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre1.6.0_XX

Also, in your Path environment variable add %JAVA_HOME%\bin to its end, this will make all the java executable’s available at the command line.

In the case of a JRE you can use an environment variable called JRE_HOME if you want instead of JAVA_HOME.