SharePoint 64bit or 32bit

Is it ok to have 32bit dev and test environments with SharePoint? The reason that I am asking is because in my experience most productive large scale MOSS implementations are 64bit.

I work for a com开发者_开发问答pany now who have very little experience with SharePoint, and I would like to give them the best advice possible, that is to try and keep the dev, test and production environments the same.

Is this a good recommendation, or does it really not make any differance?

If the servers are going to be 64bit then at the very least your staging/testing servers should be, even if your devs stick to x86.

One thing to bear in mind though is that SharePoint 2010 will be 64bit only when it ships, so if they are planning to upgrade at some point they may want to roll out x64 now.