I have managed to make significant progress this morning on this issue. After checking that the VM is able to run
sudo apt install mesa-utils
glxgears
I launched Isaac from the command line as follows:
cd /.local/share/ov/pkg/isaac_sim-2021.2.0
MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.6 ./isaac-sim.sh
I was happy to see that the simulator was brought up and we are in the process of verifying that our existing bare metal experiments - see github link - will work identically in the Ubuntu VM (with A4000 passthrough) running in ESXI host and accessed via its esxi remote console (VMware Remote Console App - App Store).