Are availability groups required for AlwaysOn Beginning a project to create an HA SQL server environment.  We are limited to using SQL Server Standard edition, currently 2016.  From what I have found, AO(AlwaysOn) for standard edition limits you to basic AG (availability group) and thus  only 1 database per AG.  This is going to be tough since most of our SQL instances contain 30+ databases.  Can you implement AO without AGs?  Are there other ways to configure AO to address our needs?  All databases on any of our instances are managed similarly and thus wouldn't need the flexibility that managing at an AG provides.
If you have an underlying Windows Cluster, and shared storage you could look at using Failover Cluster Instances - this would work at an instance level. Standard edition supports this for two nodes.