Which architecture of Office 2016 should I Install on RDS Server (32 bits or 64 bits)

Question

Currently, I am preparing an RDS Farm that will accommodate about fifty users. The farm consists of two session host servers and a broker. The RDSH server have 4 CPU and 12 GB RAM each. The servers are VMWare virtual machine on full flash SAN. I have the feeling that this case is not well documented, but I would like to know if I should install Office 2016 in 64 bits or 32 bits? A colleague told me about a possible limitation to the 32-bit installation in the case of the company's use of a 32-bit plugin, but this is not the case.

Answer 1

Office 64bit should be used if installing on a 64bit OS (which in this case, it is). I say that based on experience. Printing in RDP can be a nightmare. I was having all sort of spooler hang/crash issues, hanging up the entire server. I resolved the bulk of the problems when moving to Office 64bit. If you use 32bit, it then go via an extra layer to print (splwow64). There was also an issue with a printer driver so my problems were not 100% related to Office, but I had a significant improvement when upgrading.

But note that if your users have a lot of MS Access databases, with custom OCX loaded, they may find some incompatibilities when running in 64bit mode if the OCX are 32bit... So that's part of the choice to make.

And as you mentioned, if you use 32bit plugins, that could be an issue (for others, as you say you don't).