Is it possible to use the free VMWare player virtual machines Microsoft provides via http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads in VMWare ESXi?
I downloaded a WinXP IE8 machine, from which I extracted a .mf, .ovf and .vmdk. I can open the .ovf in ESXi 5.5.0 no problem, but during this setup, there's no opportunity to use a pre-existing virtual disk, even if I have uploaded it to one of my ESXi datastores.
I tried finishing the template set-up and then replacing the .vmdk created by that process, however, this resulted in an unbootable machine.
I also tried converting the .vmdk using VMWare Converter (no option to do this) and seeing if I could export a machine after loading it in VMWare Player. No luck there, as VMWare Player doesn't see to have an export option.
Can someone help?
UPDATE - SOLVED, see my answer below.