Interesting that they’ve mentioned M1 support. That makes me wonder if VMWare is going to get together with Apple and make a ESXi port to Apple Silicon, as the Mac Mini and Mac Pro were long standing on the HWL since they were the only rackable devices on the market legally allowed to virtualize macOS. I’m fairly certain that Apple used it internally for testing.
(AWS will probably at least attempt a port of their Nitro hypervisor to M1 as well, since it’d make the machines infinitely easier to manage at scale since Macs no longer have a NetBoot or Internet Recovery option).
AWS does not use netboot, EBS volumes appear as local NVMe drives because their custom Nitro PCIe cards handle that. In the Mac case, they connect the cards using Thunderbolt.
The Mac instances will NOT use an AWS provided hypervisor until Apple's terms change. Currently the hosting provider is only allowed to lease the whole machine, only the end user can do virtualization.
(AWS will probably at least attempt a port of their Nitro hypervisor to M1 as well, since it’d make the machines infinitely easier to manage at scale since Macs no longer have a NetBoot or Internet Recovery option).