Current: SQL 2014 Std on local storage running on ESXi 6.5 u1
Management has asked me to look into high availability for SQL; they want it to be a hot failover so we can have one server down and still be online
We're discounting database mirroring and log shipping, leaving us with AlwaysOn availability groups.
While we currently have standard, mgmt has said they'll look into getting enterprise.
Here are a couple posts from a Microsoft blog suggesting that, for on-premises VMware-hosted servers, synchronous clusters take a 2x speed hit for writes and are nearly the same for reads, compared to asynchronous clusters and standalone servers: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sambetts/2014/08/20/sharepoint-sql-server-alwayson-vs-standalone-performance/