You have both possibilities, there are HW appliances just running ADSP and you also can run them on a VM with the necessary resources. It depends on the deployment to allocate the necessary resources. You can find the installation guide on the following link:
You can use "all" WiNG access points as sensor. But you can't install ADSP on a RFS or small NX. I think only the NX9xxx supports ADSP, but VM is preferred!