Welcome ot the Community,
the NIC model that's used by default depends on the guest OS you select while creating the VM, which is "E1000" for ESXi.
You can however modify this manually in the VMs configuration (.vmx) file. To do this shut down the VM and close its tab in VMware Workstation. Then edit the .vmx file and add (or replace if the entry already exists the NIC's device type.
ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3" (alternatively you can also use ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000")
With multiple NICs in the VM's configuration do this for each NIC, i.e. ethernet1.virtualDev, ethernet2.virtualDev, ...
André
