To install a brand new Check Point Cluster, the MegaCorp IT department bought 1 Smart-1 and 2 Security Gateway Appliances to run a cluster. Which type of cluster is it?

Full HA Cluster is not a defined Check Point cluster type - the correct product term for a two-member failover cluster is simply High Availability (ClusterXL HA).

With two Security Gateway Appliances joined in a cluster and a Smart-1 appliance acting as the dedicated Security Management Server, this topology uses ClusterXL in High Availability mode where one gateway is active and the other is standby ready for failover. The Smart-1 being separate from the gateways makes this a distributed architecture, and the two-member gateway group is specifically classified as a High Availability cluster in Check Point terminology. HA mode provides gateway-level redundancy without load sharing.

Standalone means the Security Management Server and Security Gateway run on the same physical machine, which contradicts this setup where Smart-1 is a separate dedicated management appliance.

Distributed describes the overall deployment model (management and gateways on separate hardware), not the cluster type - the cluster itself is specifically High Availability.