BMC5719 & ESXi

[NiKiZe]

you are not including the pciid so it's uneccessary hard for anyone else to identify what is happening.
the iPXE tg3 drivers have some issues - so if you don't see the nic there I'm not entierly surprised.

I'm not entierly sure about your description

In pcbios when a kernel loads it throws everything of iPXE out the window.
What I can suggest if you have issues with iPXE not being able to use the nic, is to use chainloading over the existing PXE stack using undionly.kpxe