Dave,
When I thought vSphere was mainly a management/configuration interface...I'm not following your thoughts that I might need multiple physical server boxes...where did you come up with that from? I'm not a huge fan of vCenter, still need to get my head around exactly what it's used for. This is where I HATE VMWare and their changing naming conventions for essentially a new release of the same product, or the same product suite, just on a different scale (enterprise vs home user).
I'm really not sure what you meant about the physical NIC being recognised during the install. I can only assume you mean the esxi install, and so when I attempt to configure the management network at the esxi console I'm configuring the wired NIC, no the wireless NIC? At the moment, my laptop is the only physical PC I have, as my role is working from home, and moving into a consultant role.
Beeri.