Cognos 8.4 32-bit vs 64-bit on 64-bit Windows

[jv_oz]

Hi everyone,

I see there is another post on this topic that has been inactive since early this year - http://www.cognoise.com/community/index.php/topic,8211.msg27663.html#msg27663, therefore I thought I would see if the general consensus is to avoid using Cognos BI on 64-bit Windows box is still valid after the release of 8.4.1.  Any thoughts would be most appreciated! 

Thanks,

John

[CogOz]

This consultant has put together some basic tests and findings:

http://sebastianmai.blogspot.com/2009/08/ibm-cognos-84-bi-64-bit-vs-32-bit.html

There is not too many benefits moving to Cognos 8 64 bit that I can see or have read, the main benefit is if your environment requires Content Manger to use more than 2Gb of Memory, as the 64 bit Content Manager can now access up to TB's of RAM.

Most people would probably think that the reports will run faster in a 64bit env but as mentioned in many threads on here the report server is still a 32bit component so running this on a 64bit server is not going improve the performance.

[joe123]

In my opinion consider 64 Bit is worth within distributed environments.
If you have single tier installation you will end up with double installations 64bit and 32bit - with double problems and administration effort 

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/c8bi/v8r4m0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.swg.im.cognos.rdm_cr.8.4.1.doc/rdm_cr_id347rdm_InstallingOn64_bitSystems.html

[Suraj Neupane]

John,
I was not back to this forum often.
Here is the update.
We upgraded to 64-bit Windows server 2003 Enterprise edition on all DEV, Test and production environments couple of months back.
Also, the version of BI server is 64-bit.
So far, everything is working great. Transformer also doesn't have any issues.
From our experience, 64-bit on 64-bit OS didn't cause any issues.

[Allen Krause]

I've installed IBM Cognos 841 32bit on a test box with MS Server 2008 64bit.  Main reason here is MS is pushing 64bit design now (windows 7) as opposed to 32bit default in the past.

I do have an 8.3 dispatcher running on 2003 R2 64bit.  Only problem was Oracle didn't like the (x86) parentheses for x86.  Cognos tech support recommended reinstalling Cognos into any path not containing "()".  Installed into D:\Program Files\cognos\c8 and everything then on worked fine.

With the 841 build the biggest pain has been that there is currently a known bug while using server '08 64bit and Oracle 11g R2.  The bug is within Java.  I couldn't use the default 1.5 jre that IBM shipped with 841.  I had to go download a version of 1.4 and copy the ojdbc14.jar files from an existing server to be used in the cognos path (this truly only affected setting up a auditing database, content manager started just fine.)

After this through Cognos Configuration 841 started without any issues.  I'm still testing Studio compatibility in 841.  Also it appears security is setup differently.  From an admin perspective 841 runs much faster!

Hope this helps...

[Suraj Neupane]

Allen,
We didn't encounter that (x86) issue since we install Cognos in a separate partition under 'Program Files'. Looks like we skipped that issue by following our old standards on installing.