I am trying to install and run Minikube (or some kind of local Kubernetes) on an AWS EC2 instance of Windows 2016. I have seen multiple tutorials on how to do this with an Ubuntu instance, but wasn't sure if anyone has had success using nested VM's on EC2 Windows. Any guidance you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
EC2 instances don't support nested virtualization as some GCP or Azure instances do. (As of this writing)
Short answer, is that it won't work with regular instances. However, you can use a bare metal instance (i3.metal, and they are a bit costly).
I expect that AWS will create more bare metal offerings in the future and at some point offer nested virtualization on other types of instances.
As @Rico mentions you will not be able to do that on EC2. I was thinking about some solutions for you, but to be honest other than joining Windows Node to a Linux-master there is not much of other options in your scenario. It would be easier in reverse situation but you already mentioned that - minikube on Ubuntu (with --vm-driver=none) but unfortunately on Windows there is no such option, due to a reasons already mentioned. Also using a i3.metal for minikube could be a little bit of an overkill. But I guess if I am not able to think of an scenario in which that would be required it does not mean there is none.
Please note that you can't do that in GCP as well, as the documentation states that nested virtualization does not work on Windows instances:
Nested virtualization is only supported for KVM-based hypervisors running on Linux instances. ESX and Xen hypervisors are not supported.
Azure on the other hand has some articles about using nested virtualization when the hostOS and guestOS is Hyper-V. You can read about it here or here. Unfortunately I do not have Azure account to test it.
But for your question, you will not be able to use minikube on Windows Server EC2 instance.