This sounds more like the issue I am having. My main issue is that we cable the 10GB ports only which are vmnic4 and vmnic5.
Where is menu.cfg located? I tried adding it to my boot.cfg file of the ESXi image but that resulted in the ESXi install not even loading.
kernelopt=ks=http://<kickstart server>/esxi6.0/ks.cfg netdevice=vmnic4
The error was "No NIC found with name "vmnic4". I went into the console of the ESXi server and verified vmnic4 is one of the 6 NICs listed. Without the vmnic4 line, everything works up into when it tries to get an IP and then load the kickstart file.