Differences between standalone and domain mode
It's important to understand that domain mode and standalone mode are all about how your servers are managed, not what capabilities they have to service end user requests. This distinction is particularly important when it comes to high availability clusters. The current AS 7 beta1 release does not support HA functionality. However, it's important to understand that once HA functionality is added in a later beta, it will be orthogonal to "domain mode" vs. "standalone mode". That is, a group of servers running in standalone mode will be able to be configured to form an HA cluster. The domain and standalone modes determine how the servers are managed, not what capabilities they provide.