A bank requires all SD-WAN controllers to run in its own data centers or its approved public cloud for data sovereignty. It uses VMware ESXi on premises and hosts workloads in AWS and Azure, with no bare-metal provisioning team. Which hosting approach satisfies the on-premises and cloud controller requirement?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
You matched sovereignty without overcomplicating it. Virtual machines on your hypervisors plus your approved clouds keep control where you need it.
Full Explanation
Cisco supports SD-WAN Manager, Controller, and Validator as virtualized images suitable for private hypervisors such as VMware ESXi and KVM for on-premises data centers and as virtual instances in public clouds such as AWS and Azure, which lets an enterprise satisfy sovereignty by choosing location while retaining operational control. Router-hosted containers fails by concept because controllers are not supported as container workloads on IOS XE edge routers and cannot scale as fabric-wide control. SaaS-only management fails because it removes customer hosting choice and contradicts the requirement to run in owned data centers. Physical rack servers and Google Workspace or Dropbox fails because controllers do not ship as dedicated hardware appliances and Workspace and Dropbox are not infrastructure clouds for controller hosting. For the exam, remember ESXi and KVM plus AWS and Azure as the hosting envelope and size for control-plane scale, and in practice verify image sizing, high availability, and firewall ports for controller interconnect.