Re: [ActiveDir] /3GB and/or /USERVA and/or /PAE???

[Mike Baudino]

Thank you Paul, Brian, and Sue,

 

/3GB makes sense to me as well.  We put a call into Microsoft on Saturday and were told that we wanted /PAE but not /3GB.  But all they appeared to go by were the published kb articles, which we had already gone over, not found conclusive, and hence called Microsoft.

 

When's the Server 2003 version of Notes from the Field going to come out??? (rhetorical...)

 

Any issues with /PAE and /3GB in conjunction?  We're not running enterprise but our Wintel team, who built the servers, put /PAE in the boot.ini on most of the physical boxes with 4GB phyiscal RAM.  I read, in a kb article, that /PAE and /3GB can put strain on the system.

 

Brian, yes, quads were serious overkill but that's what our Wintel team wanted out there.  We spec'd pizza boxes since they're in field offices.  Some FOs have upwards of 1,000 folks in them though.  35,000 across North America.

 

Thanks,
Mike

 

On 11/6/06, Paul Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

You need 4GT enabled (/3GB switch) if these only function as DCs.  There's not much info. on this, but if you want to get the maximum LSASS footprint into RAM (~2.7GB) then you need to enable 4GT.  If you're running K3 SP1 Enterprise then PAE is enabled by default and therefore the boot.ini switch is not necessary.

 

I don't think you need to worry about PAE although sometimes the full RAM doesn't show up unless you do enable it (or, in some cases, tweak some BIOS setting).

 

 

--Paul

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Mike Baudino

To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org

Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 5:30 PM

Subject: [ActiveDir] /3GB and/or /USERVA and/or /PAE???

 

Hi all,

 

We're running a Server 2003 AD environment across 110 DCs across North America and Europe.  We have physical DCs on a variety of fairly new hardware and ESX VMs.

 

Older server hardware, approx two years old:

quad proc

2GB ram

 

ESX VMs:

dual proc

3.6GB ram

 

New server hardware, from this summer:

quad proc

4GB ram

 

 

Our DIT is around 2.3-2.4 GB and still growing slowly as we continue migrations of users.  Server migrations coming next.  There's no Exchange in our environment and the DCs are single-purpose as we don't permit anything else to be loaded on them (except for SYSVOL, antivirus, and monitoring tools, of course).

 

My concern is that none of the older hardware or the VMs are running /3GB or /PAE.  Some of the new hardware is running /PAE and some is not.  I would like to have some degree of consistency.

 

From what I can tell, running /3GB would make sense on the VMs and the newer physical boxes as it would permit more RAM to be allocated LSASS.  If we use /3GB do we need to, or want to, use /USERVA? 

 

I don't see any advantage, and in fact a disadvantage, to running /PAE.  The disadvantage may just be "bad press" but it appears that there are issues with /PAE compatibility.  Also, it appears that /PAE has no impact at or below 4GB?

 

I read another thread from earlier this summer that the VMs should probably be replaced.  We're looking into that but it will take a while.  The thread seemed to indicate that /3GB might be the way to go.

 

Anyway, I would like to know what you're running and/or would recommend.  Called Microsoft about this and they looked up the same article that we already had but seemed to offer no advise based on real world experience.  You guys are where the rubber meets the road.

 

Thanks,
Mike