Sound Card in vSphere Virtual Machine is an unsupported configuration. This is feature dedicated to Virtual Machines created in VMware Workstation. However, you can still add HD Audio device to vSphere Virtual Machine by manually editing .vmx file. I have tested it in our lab environment and it works just fine.

Professional Sound Card of an Unusual Design, with Professional and Consumer Jacks ESI presented its new sound card called Juli@ at the world-famous exhibition Musikmesse (March 31 – April 3, 2004) in Frankfurt, Germany. The card is shipped in a nice box made as a book with a transparent inner side. The box for ESI Juli@ is nice and functional. ESI offers professional audio hardware for (semi-)professional music studios. Specialized in PCIe, USB, network audio hardware, MIDI devices, studio monitors. This download provides the Realtek. High Definition Audio Driver for the 3.5mm audio jack on the Intel® NUC Kits NUC8i7HxKx. This audio driver is required if you plan to connect a microphone or headset to the audio jack or want to use the TOSLINK connection on the back of the Intel NUC. To use the generic audio driver that comes with Windows. In the search box on the taskbar, type device manager, then select it from the results. Select the arrow next to Sound, video and game controllers to expand it. Right-click the listing for your sound card or audio device, then select Update driver Browse my computer for driver software.

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Below procedure how to do this:

1. Verify storage where VM with no soundcard reside

2. Login with root to the ESXi host where VM reside using SSH.
   3. Navigate to /vmfs/volumes/<VM LUN>/<VM folder>
   In my example it was:
   ~# cd /vmfs/volumes/Local_03esx-mgmt_b/V11_GSS_DO
   4. Shut down problematic VM
   5. Edit .vmx file using VI editor.

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IMPORTANT:
Make a backup copy of the .vmx file. If your edits break the virtual machine, you can roll back to the original version of the file.
More information about editing files on ESXi host, refer to KB article: https://kb.vmware.com/kb/1020302

6. Once you have open vmx to edit, navigate to the bottom of the file and add following lines to the .vmx configuration file:
   sound.present = “true”
   sound.allowGuestConnectionControl = “false”
   sound.virtualDev = “hdaudio”
   sound.fileName = “-1”
   sound.autodetect = “true”
7. Save file and Power-On Virtual machine.
8. Once it have booted, and you have enabled Windows Audio Service, sound will work fine.

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If you go to “Edit Settings” of the VM, you can see information that device is unsupported. Please be aware that if after adding sound card to you virtual machine, you may exprience any kind of unexpected behavior (tip: in our lab env work this config without issues).