Question : I’ve enabled AWE on my 32-bit SQL Server but still can’t see more than 2 GB of RAM. What should I do?

I’ve enabled AWE on my 32-bit SQL Server but still can’t see more than 2 GB of RAM. What should I do?

Answer : I’ve enabled AWE on my 32-bit SQL Server but still can’t see more than 2 GB of RAM. What should I do?

First, check that you’re running the Enterprise or Datacenter version of Windows. Then check in c:\boot.ini for the /PAE switch which enables Windows to see the extra RAM. If that all looks fine then check that the service account has the ‘lock pages in memory’ user right. If it doesn’t there will be an error logged to the SQL Server errorlog on startup.