Thanks Fred, I've taken your advice into consideration, along with esiebert's extensive collection of Memory related links and information.
Since a virtualized server should be treated as a physical server, it's cleary stated in several sources you shouldn't disable the pagefile. Further more, disabling the pagefile would prevent VMWare from succesfully inflating a memory balloon, since the OS can't swap out it's pages (possibly it'll still swap, but to ESX's version of the pagefile. You shouldn't want that to happen however)
I was unable to find any indications on what to do with the size of the pagefile in contrast to server roles or specific applications. For example: Should a pagefile be exceedingly big or small on a SQL server, and how about for a domain controller?
Stated in Fred's link ( http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=555223 ) :
On the other hand, disk space is usually plentiful, so having a large pagefile (e.g. 1.5 times the installed RAM) does not cause a problem and eliminates the need to fuss over how large to make it.[/i]
This eases the way for us to solve our problem. We were conservative about blindly assigning 1.5 x installed RAM for the size of the pagefile, especially having read the OS can't handle more than 4 GB of memory anyway. Fred cleared the air on that subject and after reading his link we have decided to take the following approach:
On all of our server (except 2) we will set the pagefile locked on the recommended size setting (1.5 times installed RAM). From there on, we will daily monitor pagefile usage for 2 weeks. After these 2 weeks, based on the monitoring reports, we will tune the size of the pagefiles.
Of course, we will gradually implement this solution into our organization, first performing the change and monitoring actions on test servers before going to production. Further more, this will give us a change to see wether monitoring has a significant negative performance impact on our servers (we suspect it will not though)
I stated "except 2", because we have a file server and a SQL server which do not have a pagefile. We will take a different approach for these servers. First, we will monitor memory usage to see if there is a need for a pagefile. Based on those findings, we will determine wether or not to enable the pagefile.
I'd like to thank you all for your help.