Actually, scratch that with the tar command. I just found out the hard way that this not a standard tar format (seriously VMware?):
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/217233
So you need a step in between that converts the VMware proprietary tar archive to a standard tar archive with the vmtar tool.
This procedure for editing the mapping file should work, tested this on a 5.1 host with another qlogic bundle:
cd /tmp/
cp /bootbank/scsi_qla.v00 /tmp/scsi_qla.gz
gunzip scsi_qla.gz
vmtar -x scsi_qla -o scsi_qla.tar
mkdir /tmp/qla
tar xvf scsi_qla.tar -C /tmp/qla/
etc/
etc/vmware/
etc/vmware/driver.map.d/
etc/vmware/driver.map.d/qla4xxx.map
usr/
usr/lib/
usr/lib/vmware/
usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/
usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/qla4xxx
usr/share/
usr/share/hwdata/
usr/share/hwdata/driver.pciids.d/
usr/share/hwdata/driver.pciids.d/qla4xxx.ids
This extracts all files to /tmp/qla/, edit them there and then re-pack the archive, replacing the bootbank file:
cd /tmp/qla
tar -cf scsi_qla.tar ./*
vmtar -c scsi_qla.tar -o scsi_qla
gzip scsi_qla
mv scsi_qla.gz scsi_qla.v00
cp scsi_qla.v00 /bootbank/scsi_qla.v00
Finally reboot.