First, to be clear the reason i'm putting this here as i know this will keep happening in future with vmware future releases. there's plenty of blogs with their workarounds which are either temporary or seldom.
I have a lab environment with 2 servers which work perfectly fine with Esxi 5.1. However, when i upgrade them to anything above that, for example vsphere 6.5, the installation halts reason "NICs obsolete or not supported anymore by vmware"
To name NICs are Realtek RTL8111 and Intel 82576
All I'm trying to find is a permanent solution using ESXI 5.1 Offline Bundle or ISO for the same to be used every time