Confusion over MS Terms

So, I was chatting with a colleague in our IT team about beefing up redundancy for our SQL Servers for the web apps. Turns out, VMware’s disk consolidation can unexpectedly take a server offline – not cool for customer happiness. Anyhow, amidst the tech talk, my buddy kept mentioning “Always On,” and I jumped to the conclusion it was about Availability Groups. Lesson learned: listen closely, not just for buzzwords.

He was all hyped about SQL2016 SP1’s licensing changes, particularly the basic availability groups in the Standard license. I clarified that only one DB could go into the AG per listener, which wouldn’t cut it for us. But he persisted, noting that AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance with two nodes could work under the Standard license.

Then the lightbulb went off. Microsoft’s marketing team played tricks with the terminology. When I delved into what AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance actually is, it sounded like a good ol’ traditional SQL cluster – two nodes, shared storage, one active node at a time, with 30-90 second failovers. It’s the classic SQL cluster setup rebranded by Microsoft.

Who knows why MS decided to rename a tried-and-true setup, right? Maybe I missed a memo somewhere. If you stumble upon this confusion, hopefully, this post pops up on Google to save your day!