We're setting up AlwaysOn Availability Groups in our test environment. This is a preliminary setup to review features. We're eventually replacing our SQL cluster (4 instances) with VMs. First question, what Windows edition? Windows 2012 R2 Standard and Datacenter, both have Windows Server Failover Cluster as an option to install. Our SQL cluster is all Enterprise. But now there's an alternative - continue with a vanilla Enterprise install? Any consideration for standard edition?
One website I read, while there were multiple responses, there was no clear cut reason for either. Comments are appreciated...