PAE, AWE And Pagefile

Can you please consider the following scenario:

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (32-bit)

SQL 2000 Enterprise Edition

Server with 8GB memory



1. If we enable /3GB and /PAE, the server can see and use 8GB memory, OS has 1GB, applications can use the remaining 7GB, can install 2 instances of SQL with a max server mem set to 3GB each, SQL should be able to allocate memory from the upper 4GB RAM. (True / False)

2. We only need to enable AWE if any single instance need to cache more than 4GB of data so we could for example configure one instance with AWE and set the max mem to 5GB and set the second instance to use 2GB max . (True / False).

3. 32-bit windows server OS can support a maximum of 4GB virtual memory, does this mean setting the pagefile to more than 4GB is a waste of disk space or does PAE extend this limitation ?

4.With AWE enabled, anything above the 4GB virtual space is used for data caching only (can't be used to manage user connections, locks, stored procedure compilations...etc). How does this work when running 2 separate instances with 3GB each and AWE disabled? would they receive 4GB of virtual pageable address space each ?

Regards,

AE