It worked with some old build version of the ESXi 5.0 branch, but this was the one with the auto start error (see: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/07/vsphere-hypervisor-auto-start-bug-fixed.html)
I do not believe that the hardware is broken, because I did some tests with different OSes.
1) MemTest86 and MemTest86+ do not report errors
2) SMART short test and extended test without errors under linux 2.6
3) With linux I tried
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
to exclude any hdd controller issues. No errors.
4) Tried iperf to stress the NICs, no errors and good results
5) Then I booted a basic linux, mounted both hdd and copied >500GB via network from and to another server all night. No errors.
Hence, I do not believe into a hardware problem, but into a problem of the e1000e driver delivered with ESXi. As you can see on the photo, the page fault occurs somewhere in the polling routine of the e100e driver and this sounds similar to the error I linked to.
Matthias