Hmm, it seems the comment about the unsupported PCI device may be an effect of using the vSphere client instead of the web client. I created a new Windows 7 VM and used the driver provided in the VIB package from nvidia and it worked. In the console the PCI device still says unsupported. I will try to update the driver in our w2k8 server now.
update: yes it seems I used the wrong driver package. It seems I may have been trying to use a different driver that I guess was for using with vSGA or pass through.
nothing to see here, move along 