SQL SERVER 2014 Standard - High Availability Listener solution The company has SQL Server 2014 Standard licenses and we're standing the servers up in a VMware environment.

My initial plan is to create 2 instances on each DB server and run Instance1 on SQL1 as primary, Instance2 on SQL2 as primary with failover vice versa.  

Questions:


Without the listener available only through Enterprise addition, has anyone used a load balancer to repoint the DB connection when you failover for maintenance?
Is there a better method for failing over with Standard Edition? 


The only other solution that comes to mind is DNS CNames/ALIAS and repointing to a different IP address, but that seems inherently flawed.
With SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition you can create a two-node failover infrastructure. For that, you need to have in each node at least Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Standard, because you need to first generate a failover cluster with Windows Server.

If you want a multi-instance failover cluster, then you need to generate two SQL Server 2014 installations, since the product works in an Active-Passive mode. I mean, you will need to install the first instance, SQL1 and then you will proceed with the second instance, SQL2. You will need to configure each instance so SQL1 runs in node 1 and SQL2 runs in node 2.

Also, it's very important and recommended, that you have at least a SAN or some device that can provide you with the shared storage schema, since previous to the SQL Server failover cluster installation you need to validate the Windows Server failover cluster support to the SQL Server one.