Welcome to the Community - No it will not work - vCenter 4.1 does not support ESXi 5
Welcome to the Community - No it will not work - vCenter 4.1 does not support ESXi 5
Although weinstein5 already answered the question, I'd like to mention the Interpretability Matrix in which you can see what works together.
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/sim/interop_matrix.php
André