You are correct, it's a tradeoff however it's handled, unless you have the resources to create a massive failover node, (which, by definition most of the time does nothing).

So far,...

ok, thanks for the clarification.

Worst case scenario, only the failover (b node) is running.

With hard configured memory you've got to allocate chunks of memory to each instance running...

If I understand this right, you're proposing:

4 node cluster

Node A is the active primary 8GB ram AWE enabled /PAE

Node B is the passive failover 8GB ram AWE enabled /PAE

Node C...

Are you using microsoft clustering services?

if so, when you setup the sql server cluster, you specified an IP address that you will need to rerun setup to alter. SQL...

Good article! I've used something like this in the past for database transfers.

 if you're going to use this in a production environment, be sure the first couple of times you...