I tried something similar one time but not on ESXi. Two ports can’t have the same IP address so I created an /etc/hosts file so each host knew about the other based on hostname and not ip address.

I had the same issue, only using a 930-8i w/ 2M cache. Honestly performance sucked on all of my VMs. I reinstalled the server with Rocky Linux 8.8 and KVM using the same array and performance was acceptable (the array was configured as a LVM volume). I then added a NVMe drive as a LVM cache and performance was much better (good enough for my homelab). Too bad, since I really prefer VMware.

You really don’t want to do this. Read up on how ftp uses random ports and is not really secure and you will quickly change your mind. A good alternative is SFTP, part of SSH. It uses the same port and is much more secure.