SQL 2016 licensing guide – download

High Availability for SQL 2016 Standard edition now has the “Basic Availability Group”.

The Basic Availability Group is based on AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AAG) that was released in SQL 2012 Enterprise. AAG continues to be an Enterprise edition feature set.

Basic availability groups use a subset of features compared to advanced availability groups on SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition. Basic availability groups include the following limitations:

• Limit of two replicas (primary and secondary).
• No read access on secondary replica.
• No backups on secondary replica.
• No support for replicas hosted on servers running a version of SQL Server prior to SQL Server 2016 Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3).
• No support for adding or removing a replica to an existing basic availability group.
• Support for one availability database.
• Basic availability groups cannot be upgraded to advanced availability groups. The group must be dropped and re-added to a group that contains servers running only SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition.
• Basic availability groups are only supported for Standard Edition servers.

Basic Availability Group – info on MSDN