I have a small office, and I currently use a Visual Foxpro Application that I wrote to handle all the data.
It is time to buy a new server. It seems that there are problems with VFP and 64 bit operating system. Should I make the move to 64 bit and try to deal with the problems that arise, or buy a new server running the older 32 bit acrhitecture?
The latter would of course require that I use Exchange 2003 instead of 2007 or 2008. Probably no big deal?
The main reason to upgrade to 64-bit is to allow the OS to utilize more than 4 Gigabytes of RAM. In a 32-bit architecture, the CPU registers are only able to address 2^32 memory locations. In 64-bit processors, you get up to 2^64 memory locations. This is plenty for a long time to come.
Maybe you could use virtualisation products to set up an appropiate environment on the modern server which still is compatible to VFP.
That way you could run the conflicting applications in a virtual 32bit-environment on the new server and the modern applications outside on the real 64bit-environment.
Buy two cheap servers instead of a single one. :)
But in all seriousness, if there are issues, you might want to buy a 64 bit box, and then load a 32 bit OS on it.
Then when the issues are cleared up, or you can clear them up yourself, you can do the change over. That's just one idea though.
My other opinion though is to replace the Visual FoxPro Application with something a bit more modern and maintained. ;) You might be amazed how much more efficient some of the dev stacks are - especially for smaller offices.
...as Kosi2801 says about virtualization. That could be applied with my suggestion also. Buy a nice 64 bit box and use VMWare's ESX Server. It might even work out BETTER than actually trying to run all the services on a single box. The tools VMWare has out are VERY impressive these days.