I am trying to setup a failover location for MOSS. The current farm is built on 32 bit Windows 2003. The servers ar the failover location are all 64 bit Windows 2008.
Is there any way to make these two environments talk and stay in sync? I have considered a "stretched" farm configuration, but that won't work unles the bit width of both locations are the same.
The current database server for MOSS is replicated to our failover location using clustering and is visible at both locations.
You can mix 32 bits and 64 bits in the same farm, it's fully supported.
However, it's highly recommenced to keep each tiers in the same bit width (for example all WFE 64 bits, application server 32 bits, SQL servers 64 bits).
From msdn @ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261700.aspx
You can deploy an Office SharePoint Server 2007 farm on a mix of 32-bit and 64-bit servers, provided that you maintain architecture homogeneity at each topology layer. For example, you should not mix 32-bit and 64-bit Web front-end (WFE) servers, but you may use 64-bit database servers in a farm with 32-bit WFE servers and application servers.
We are actually running 32 and 64 bit wfe's in the same farm with no problems. We talked to an MVP and he said it is absolutely supported. The issue you have is load balancing 32 and 64 together.
MVP quote about the MSDN atricle http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261700.aspx:
They assume you are load balancing 32 and 64 in the same NLB and that wouldn't balance well. It is absolutely supported architectually, however. It should work.