We just ran into the same error. We called HP and got a really poor tech. He said "We don't support upgrades, wipe the host and install from scratch". Since we have lots of remote locations, this wasn't even reasonable. We hung up and did our own work starting with powering off the vm's and putting the host in maintenance mode. Then the following steps were done via ILO on a local pc in the remote location:
1) Log into the host (we did this from the console via ESXi Shell)
2) Remove all broadcom components. The order of removal was important due to dependencies. We tried removing just bnx2 and bnx2x but got the error again, so we took them all out
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=net-bnx2
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=net-bnx2x
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=net-tg3
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=scsi-bnx2fc
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=scsi-bnx2i
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=net-cnic
esxcli software vib remove --vibname=misc-cnic-register
3) Reboot host to iso
4) Run the upgrade, preserve datastore -> reboot host
5) Remediate via the vsphere client if necessary. We did
6) Exit maintenance mode, start vm's and the upgrade is complete!