There is some considerations we have to make when we first come up with planning to install software. One of them is what kind application we will run in PC. It becomes a problem when our software doesn’t meet the requirement of hardware and OS.

Such a problem may exist for different architecture (32bit or 62bit (high-end)), mostly it comes from software with it’s specific environment so that it’s failed to install in any different system that miss match the requirement. The other problem is program and memory access issue. Theory says that 32bit hardware/processor can only access memory address up to 4Giga or 2^32 address. So it’s impossible for us trying to install 64bit software in 32bit architecture and wanting it to run well. but different things happen when we tried to install 32bit program in 64bit architecture. Most OS support this with different solutions.

As a (still) biggest OS, Microsoft may found this problem happen many times. So it comes with compatibility options to overcome the problem of different windows version released. Such options exist for windows common user. While for user that wants to maintain Windows server, Windows comes up with WoW64.

wikipedia :

WoW64 (Windows 32-bit On Windows 64-bit) is a subsystem of the Windows operating system that is capable of running 32-bit applications and is included on all 64-bit versions of Windows — including Windows 2000 Limited Edition, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, IA-64 and x64 versions of Windows Server 2003, as well as 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7. In Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core, it is an optional component. WoW64 is designed to take care of many of the differences between 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows, particularly involving structural changes to Windows itself.

with the default setting installation, windows server has turn this feature on,  so you shouldn’t worried about this issue.