ESXi standalone host cannot power on any virtual machines

vCenter is a management tool installed on either a physical or virtual Windows 2003 or 2008 server. vCenter in turn manages ESX and ESXi hosts/clusters.

It sounds like you're trying to directly add an ESX or ESXi server when in fact its meant to communicate with a "vCenter" server.

Since your VMs can talk to the inside of your Comcast router over vSwitch0, the physical nic used by vSwitch0 is also connected to the inside. I don't have that hardware at my disposal, and the Internet provides conflicting information, but I suspect that the router actually figures out which traffic to NAT, and which to pass through, based on the physical ports. That's why you can use DHCP and internal IPs on one port, and a public IP with your laptop on another port.

If my understanding is correct, then you need to attach another physical nic of your ESXi server to a port on the Comcast device, configure a new vSwitch using that pnic, and connect your VM to that vSwitch.

Now, forget everything I've just said. Because connecting a web server directly to the Internet is just reckless.

Instead, configure your web server VM with a static IP on your LAN (same network as assigned over DHCP, making sure the IP you choose is not in the DHCP range). Then you have two alternatives for routing: 1. Set up port forwarding for the public IP address used by the Gateway, so that connections to ports 80 and 443 go to your web VM's static IP, and connect web VM to vSwitch0. 2. Set up another firewall that will hold your public IPs and port forward 80+443, create another network path (second pnic - second vSwitch) to connect to the inside of that new firewall, and connect web VM to the new vSwitch.