[ale] Can shmmax be set > total memory without harm?

[Reggie Euser]

Might be a dumb questions, but Google hasn't answered it for me...

I'm working on a virtual machine with 3Gb (3107660k) RAM allocated to it. 
Running CentOS 5.4.

These settings per /proc/sys/kernel:

shmmax = 4294967295
shmall = 26843456

PAGE_SIZE= 4096

Can shmmax be set greater than allocated RAM without causing issues?

Stated another way, could issues this server is having - CPU max'ing out, 
etc. - be blamed on this setting or corrected by resetting shmmax to 
something less than total RAM?

Any help would be much appreciated!