The following article suggests that ESXI version 7 supports managed and surprise Hot Plug for nvme drives.
Supported scenarios of NVME hot plug/removal in ESXi (78297) (vmware.com)
Which other versions of ESXI support Hot plug for nvme drives? For example is ESXI 6.5 or ESXI 6.7 compatible with nvme hot plug?
Also, I noticed in the Vmware compatibility matrix there is a feature called "PCIe Hot-Plug Ready". What is the definition of this feature?
VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search