I was doing some testing on my Apple 2018 Mac Mini with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1 release and I needed to setup a separate network connection as the onboard 10GbE was not working for me initially. I was out of ideas but I did remember that I still have my Apple Thunderbolt 2 to gigabit ethernet adapter which was something I had used quite a bit in the early days when I was using the Apple Mac Mini as my homelab system.
Like all recent Apple Mac's, the 2018 Mac Mini only supports Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and obviously not compatibility with the network adapter. Luckily, I did have an official Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter lying around which would allow me to connect the network adapter to the Mac Mini and to my surprise, it was automatically detected by the latest release of ESXi!
This partially came in a surprise because the Apple network adapter uses the Broadcom tg3 driver and I was not 100% sure if the native Broadcom (ntg3) would automatically claim this device since it was never officially supported.
Its definitely good to know this ethernet adapter still works as long as you have a TB2 to TB3 converter adapter and this should also work for any Intel NUC that have Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Thanks for the comment!