SQL Cluster, AlwaysOn AG, or Something Else? I really needs some help with Setting up SQL servers.  We are re-configuring our network and have no clue how to resolve our SQL issue.  My Network Admin. wants an "Active/Active" with shared storage (SAN) solution.  The reason for this is load balancing, redundancy, and auto-fail over.  I do not believe this can be done or should be done.  Please help me figure this out.  I have listed some info. below on our setup.  Thank you


We will most likely use three servers, possible using VMs
We have a SAN with 1GB networking
Solution needs to have auto-fail over and the secondary node's database needs to be synchronous
If possible with a solution to have mixed hardware (Intel, AMD)
All servers and equipment located in one location 
We will be using either SQL Server 2012 R2 or 2014
My Network Admin. wants an "Active/Active" with shared storage 


There is no such thing as an "active/active" instance.  Only one node of the cluster can be hosting the SQL instance for a failover cluster instance.  If by "active/active" you mean having two different SQL Server failover cluster instances, that is possible.

Why shared storage?  That's an odd "requirement", and usually comes as a need from a requirement, not typically a requirement itself.  The failover cluster instance would exercise shared storage, but different replicas in an availability group would have their own storage.


  load balancing


There is no load balancing with a failover cluster instance.  For an availability group, you can offload certain operations to secondary replicas (reporting/readonly workloads, backups, etc.), but there is no fully capable (data modifying) load that can be offloaded to a secondary.


  redundancy


This can be achieved with either a failover cluster instance and/or an availability group.


  auto-fail over


This can be achieved with either a failover cluster instance or an availability group.

One of the main questions you need to ask yourself is what level of high availability are you looking for?  A failover cluster instance will give you HA for the whole instance, whereas an availability group will give you high availability of a grouping of databases as a unit of failover.