Always on high availability groups option is grayed out

There are two parts to this. First, make sure you install CU1. Notably it contains a fix for

• Performance issues occur when using the sys.dm_hadr_availability_replica_states DMV on an AlwaysOn Availability Group that contains many databases in SQL Server 2016

The second part is to use T-SQL instead of PowerShell. When I do it this way, the availability groups get created much, much faster and I'm not seeing any of the CPU/thread issues I complained about above. This is the code I'm using to create the Availability Groups with direct seeding. I've adapted it from this blog post:

• SQL Server 2016: Availability Groups, Direct Seeding, and You.

On the primary:

CREATE AVAILABILITY GROUP [vm-ag-TestDb21] 
WITH (BASIC,
DB_FAILOVER = OFF,
DTC_SUPPORT = NONE)  
FOR DATABASE [TestDb21]
REPLICA ON 
N'vm-sqllab1' WITH (ENDPOINT_URL = N'TCP://vm-sqllab1.domain:5022',  
    FAILOVER_MODE = MANUAL,  
    AVAILABILITY_MODE = ASYNCHRONOUS_COMMIT,   
    BACKUP_PRIORITY = 50,   
    SECONDARY_ROLE(ALLOW_CONNECTIONS = NO),   
    SEEDING_MODE = AUTOMATIC),   
N'vm-sqllab2' WITH (ENDPOINT_URL = N'TCP://vm-sqllab2.domain:5022',   
    FAILOVER_MODE = MANUAL,   
    AVAILABILITY_MODE = ASYNCHRONOUS_COMMIT,   
    BACKUP_PRIORITY = 50,   
    SECONDARY_ROLE(ALLOW_CONNECTIONS = NO),   
    SEEDING_MODE = AUTOMATIC)   

GO  

And on the replica:

ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP [vm-ag-TestDb21] JOIN
GO
ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP [vm-ag-TestDb21] GRANT CREATE ANY DATABASE
GO

How can all 4 servers have access to this drive, when I have one server in a different location on a different subnet?

Get really friendly with your network and security teams. Ask them, politely if need be, to create a file share for that folder and allow your service accounts access to said file share.

Other than the service account, this really doesn't have any involvement with SQL Server.