After 3 months of digging and researching, I was able to find my own answer to this.
What appears to be happening, as best I can tell, is that the VMWare ESXi kernel is detecting the QLogic QLE8152 10GB NIC as both being an iSCSI NIC device (loading system driver "qlge" for it) as well as being a Fibre Channel device (loading system driver "qlnativfc" for it). HP Systems Insight Manager sees the Fibre Channel driver loaded, but does not see any successful connectivity for it, so generates an alert (similar to what it does for NICs that aren't connected, but with no option in the "WBEM Health Inclusion Status" to Ignore it).
Solution:
Disable the "qlnativefc" system/kernel driver within VMWare ESXi.
I have tested the following against VMWare ESXi 5.5.0 (build 1331820), but suspect it will be the same/similar for other VMWare ESXi versions.
Detailed Steps
1. Enable SSH for the Host via vSphere (Configuration tab :: Security Profile :: Click "Properties" on Services window :: highlight SSH :: click "Options" :: Click "Start" )
2. SSH connect to the VMWare Host using Putty (or your favorite SSH program) and login as root.
3. Run the following command to check the status of the QLogic kernel/system drivers:
esxcli system module list | grep ql
Normal output should look something like:
qlnativefc true true
qlge true true
4. Disable the qlnativefc system driver from loading on kernel boot by issuing the following command:
esxcli system module set --enabled=false --module=qlnativefc
5. Verify that the qlnativefc system driver is diabled by running the same list command from step 3. Output should look something like:
qlnativefc true false
qlge true true
6. Reboot the ESXi Server (will not load the qlnativefc system driver on the next boot...did not find a way to unload without a reboot):
7. Re-establish an SSH connection after the host reboots and verify that the qlnativefc system driver is both disabled and did not load by running the same list command from step 3. Output should look something like:
qlge true true
qla2xxx true true
qlnativefc false false
NOTE: Not entirely sure why it started loading a new qla2xxx driver after I disabled the qlnativefc driver...could be a lower detect order driver in the kernel that matches the same hardware id string as the qlnativefc driver. In any event, having it load did not cause the same HP SIM alerts for "FC HBA".