I'm posting this so others might not have to spend hours on the line with support figuring this out.
My environment is older and has the Emulex LPe11000 hba cards. This card isn't discovered oob.
Obviously a problem right. After spending hours on the phone with VMWare support they pointed me to Emulex.
The issue really is that some of VMWare's support personnel don't know where they keep all the VIB files for their OS.
I was able to find the attached VIB here. Import this and apply it and your Emulex card will start working and you can take your hosts up to ESXi 6.
Legend. Worked for be ESXi 6 U3 LPe1150 adapter.
That worked for us too. Thanks a lot. We had this problem after upgrading from 5.0 to 6.0. Your procedure helped!
Update from 10/27/2020
If you ended up updating your ESXi/vSphere environment to the latest version (e.g. 6.5 or 6.7), you will have to reinstall your legacy driver again.
To resolve that, you can use latest lpfc driver for VMWare 6.0 from the same HP repository:
1. Enable ssh on your VMWare host and log in via favorite client
2. cd /tmp
3. wget http://vibsdepot.hpe.com/hpq/latest/esxi-600-devicedrivers/VMW-ESX-6.0.0-lpfc-10.5.70.0-2750149.zip
4. unzip VMW-ESX-6.0.0-lpfc-10.5.70.0-2750149.zip
5. esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/lpfc-10.5.70.0-1OEM.600.0.0.2159203.x86_64.vib
6. reboot
... and enjoy your Emulex LPe11xxx card again.