Sorry to bring up an old post,

But i can't understand when you say its works natively in version 5.0.

I have tried to install it but fails to find the above mentioned nic.

I download and created a bootable CD from the vmware website,
but it still does not find the network card?

Does it try to load a driver for it or does it not recognize your NIC at all? If you run lspci, is the NIC listed?

You are able to start the install as such and apears to try to look for a network card but stops and gives a message saying no network card found and being unable to continue with the instation. Its not obviously a customized installation. not sure how to do that.

Sorry for being stupid but what is lspci?

Once you get an install error, press ALT+F1 to access the console. I haven't tried this with 5.x, but it has worked fine with 4.x and earlier.

If you get a login prompt, use root with no password.

You can run lspci to print out PCI information. lspci on it's own should show you if the NIC is recognized as one. You can try lspci | less to control output or lspci -p. With lspci -p if you see the PCI ids for the NIC and the NIC is labeled as vmnicX, then check the module column to see if anything is listed. If the module column is empty then it usually means that ESXi recognizes the device as a NIC, but wasn't able to load a driver for it.