Nice to see your problem resolved!
I didn't do vmkping yet. I just installed ESXi 5.0 and still trying to find out how to get to a putty session?
You have to enable the SSH service first, which is disabled by default. This could be done in various way, but the simplest may be to use the DCUI interface directly at the host console. Log in with F2, go to troubleshooting options and enable SSH.