The deed is done! Upon more digging, I found that the SR-IOV was not turned on in the BIOS. Turning it on there did not completely solve the problem. Once it was on, I had to allow SR-IOV in the PCI Hardware configuration of ESXi. Once I turned on SR-IOV for the video card I wanted, I rebooted the system, and presto, the error went away and NVIDIA-SMI gave me what I needed. The only caveat is that I still get the 'NVIDIA: Device Groups generation failed.' alert on startup. Does anyone know how I can fix that?