Nvidia-smi no devices were found in VMWare Ubuntu 20.04.03 and RTX3060

I tried to install CUDA 11.6 on my Ubuntu 20.04.03 which is running on VMWare esxi based on the tutorial here : https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-linux/index.html#ubuntu-installation. Before that, I installed MLNX_OFED as mentioned here: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-linux/index.html#install-mlnx-ofed because I wanted to use GPUDirect Storage. But when I issue the command “nvidia-smi”, I keep getting “no devices were found”. At first my linux kernel was 5.13, but after getting no results, I downgraded it to 5.4 because the Nvidia documentation said it the version is tested and reinstalled the cuda afterwards. I even changed the Nvidia driver to version 470 in “additional drivers” but still getting “no devices were found”
can please anybody help?

Were you able to figure this one out? I have had it working stable for about 6 months until all the sudden I encountered the same issue with my 3070.

Nvidia-smi
Output: No devices were found

I have reinstalled drivers with no success. I did spin up a Windows 10 VM and passed through the GPU there and it works, so it is not a hardware issue.

EDIT:
sudo lspci |grep -i nv shows the below output, so it “sees” the GPU hardware.

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 2484 (rev a1)
03:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 228b (rev a1)

No I couldn’t solve the problem. I decided to use a real machine instead of VM and it’s working flawlessly