ESXi - Multiple Separate Concurrent Uplinks on vSwitch?

So the physical server running ESXi and hosting the pfSense virtual machine has 12 physical UTP cables connected to it: one for the WAN link to your internet router and 11 for internal connections? Do these 11 internal-use UTP cables go directly to other servers or do they connect to a switch first? If only one is up and the other 10 are down, I would suspect that the spanning-tree protocol on your switch disables the 10 interfaces as it detects a loop? Why not create a port-channel (LACP) configuration on your switch and ESXi host?

If these cables directly connect the ESXi host to other servers, I would check port speed and duplex settings as well as the UTP cable type (straight vs. crossover).