Hi,I recently inherited a pretty nice box that used to be a vmware host box with 16 gigs of ram in it.My first question is about the page file. I know I cannot set the one page file to larger than 4 gigs but should I create more than one pagefile to give me 6 gigs of pagefiles?I've also been looking into whether or not to enable the pae switch on a new server that I'm building. it's an IBM 255 which has 16 gigs of ram in it and I'm very tempted to use the pae switch in my boot.ini file. I've seen the articles and discussions on the Exchange blog about how it's now recommended.After enabling it and rerunning the BPA against it I now get this message: Exchange server escmsg07.escg.jacobs.com has more than 4 GB of memory. To avoid severe kernel memory depletion, limit or remove physical memory. Memory count is 16183 MB.When I click on the link to go check it out I get this ominous note:you can run a Windows hotfix that will help prevent Exchange information store failures that could occur when there is more than 4 GB of RAM available. Note that the recommended best practice is to dedicate a computer to run Exchange Server only. For details about the hotfix, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 834628, "Data is corrupted when PAE is enabled on a Windows Server 2003-based computer" (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=3052&kbid=834628). <!-- ApplyClick with current id --> To correct this warning Once the boot.ini file is visible in Explorer, right-click the file, click Open With, and choose Notepad to open the file. In the [Operating Systems] section, add the following switch to the startup line: /BURNMEMORY=<Value in MB>Should I use the pae switch or should I not?Do I need to worry about data corruption if I use all the memory in this server?Any guidance you can give me is very much appreciated.Best Regards,Fred Towery

You should be using PAE here. Set it to 4GB and use the /3GB switch. If you have resource issues you may need to twiddle with /USERVA as well. Active Directory, 4th Edition - www.briandesmond.com/ad4/

Thanks for your input Brian. It is very much appreciated.I am curious as to why I should not be using the pae switch. Is this because it just doesn't give much advantage on a 32 bit box and Exchange 2003?The reason I ask is that I have read on the Exchange team blogs and the You had me at EHLO site that the Exchange team is now recommending the pae switch.I am quite interested in your take on this as I am not an experienced Exchange guy yet, but trying to learn.Thanks again and best regards,Fred Towery

Hi Fred-Looks like this has changed since last time I had to deal with this. You're correct - you want /pae per http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/07/05/407330.aspx. Active Directory, 4th Edition - www.briandesmond.com/ad4/