Run 64bit 9.4 and 32bit 9.4 on same Win10 PC

[Quentin]

I've got a new Win 10 PC.  Should I be able to install both 64 bit 9.4 (M4 probably) and 32 bit 9.4 on the same PC and have them happily coexist?

On my prior Win7 PC, I had 64 bit 9.4M4 and 32 bit 9.3 on the same PC.  One was installed in /SASHOME and the second installed in /SASHOME2, and I didn't have any problems.

Mostly I've been happy with 64bit SAS, but we have a few legacy applications that rely on 32 bit SAS.  (Yes, hopefully we will upgrade the applications in time. : )

Thanks,

-Q.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @Quentin,

it is not really possible to have more than a SAS foundation of same version on the same machine (pc or server). EG, might be an exception to this rule, since it can run on 32-bit compatibility mode, but that is it.

The only thing you could do it to have a Virtual Machine, with one of those SAS versions and the other version locally installed in your PC.

[LinusH]

Having two separate SAS installations sounds awkward, and costly, especially if you have local installations.
Having them on a terminal server would make the situation better.
But what is stopping you from converting to 64-bit? It's "just" a matter of PROC CPORT/CIMPORT of catalogue entries.

[Quentin]

Fair enough @LinusH.  I wasn't thinking of two versions as a routine for everyone, but it's worked fine for me.  Mostly laziness/prioritization.  I had 9.3 on my PC, and have to occasionally maintain some legacy SAS/AF apps that are running on a few PCs scattered around running on 9.3 (and older).  So when 9.4 came out first only in 64-bit, I installed 9.4, but also left 9.3 in place in case I needed to make any tweeks to the legacy apps.  I also have some code that uses the excel engine to pull from Excel (sigh), and since we're using 32-bit Excel, I'll need to change that to use the xlsx engine.  

Basically, if/when there are available resources, we'll eventually need to put in some effort to migrate and then validate these apps (often the migration effort is minimal, but the validation effort including report writing and signing can be orders of magnitude more : )

But we might also just end up running 32-bit 9.4 for a while, and let that technical debt keep accumulating a bit longer. : )  Happily, 90% of my work is on our server, where I don't have to deal with this stuff.

[shayne · Accepted solution]

Hi @Quentin - Technically it is supported to run 32-bit and 64-bit SAS 9.4 side by side on the same machine. If you do this, you'll need to install the 64-bit version before installing the 32-bit version.

One other point to mention since you also have 9.3 on the machine is that 9.3 and 9.4 have shared components that live in the 9.3 SAS installation directory (SASHome). This means that if you ever want to complete remove 9.3 from the machine (e.g. uninstall and delete the SASHome directory post-uninstall), you'd need to first remove 9.4, then 9.3, then reinstall 9.4. 

Let me know if you have any questions!

[Quentin]

Thanks @shayne that's great to know.  I'll give it a shot.