Java 32-bit VM is not starting on 64-bit RHEL due to a "Could not reserve enough space for object heap" message

Issue

• We are facing the error below when starting the java processes:

java -server -Xms512m -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -version
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.

• We are using 32 bit java on a 64 bit operating system. The same error is not seen when using the 64 bit version of Java.

• Why is it failing to allocate 2GB of heap when there are still about 110GB of free RAM on the system?

• Unable to allocate more that 2gigs of heap on a 32 bit java process. while starting from user user1 . When starting the same process from root, the JVM is able to start with a heap of 3.5g.