When organizations deploy HCI at scale (more than eight nodes in a single logical configuration), cracks in its architecture can begin to appear unless organizations carefully examine how well it scales. On the surface, high end and standard hyper-converged architectures deliver the same benefits. They each virtualize compute, memory, storage networking, and data storage in a simple to deploy and manage scale-out architecture. They support standard hypervisor platforms. They provide their own data protection solutions in the form of snapshots and replication. In short, these two architectures mirror each other in many ways. However, high-end and standard HCI solutions differ in functionality in ways that primarily surface in large virtualized deployments.