I'm also having an issue here. I've got 2 nested ESXi hosts which I'm playing with. We do have physical ESXi hosts which all use ESXi5.5 images but a 5.1 Host Profile, these work fine and use the dvSwitch configuration. With the 5.5 host profile, there are networking issues where the networking is not applied to the host if you're using a dvSwitch. I got this working fine using a standard switch configuration, however, when I switched the config to use our dvSwitches, its doesn't work. It used to leave the IP address of the host a DHCP assigned address, but I've now managed to get it to apply the correct IP, but the host is not on the network and the host profile hasn't completely applied, so it's not manageable from vCenter. I'm using build 1746018 which is 5.5 1a I believe. Not sure why it won't work, none of us in my team at work have sussed it. May be time for a call to VMware? How did you get on? Have you sussed this one?
Bob