For an on‑premises SD‑WAN deployment on ESXi, what responsibility falls to the IT team?

In an on-premises SD-WAN deployment on ESXi, the customer's IT team is responsible for the infrastructure. This includes provisioning the SD-WAN controllers (vManage, vBond, vSmart) as virtual machines on their ESXi hypervisor. They are also solely responsible for implementing and managing backup and disaster recovery strategies for these controllers, as they reside within the customer's data center. Cisco provides the software images but not the operational management of the customer's on-premises virtual infrastructure. Cisco does not provision backup platforms or manage customer vManage instances directly in an on-premises deployment. A managed service provider might handle this in a different deployment model, but not for a customer's on-premises ESXi setup.