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Jay ThomasFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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vmware ESXi 5 has expired before i could export my guests

Hi all, I'm currently studying for xenapp 6 exam and and i put the environment on top of  VMWare 5.1 ESXi because i needed to run the access gateway appliance that would only run on ESX.
OK, so i deployed vmware workstation 9 and the deployed 2 ESXi 5.1 servers and installed 3 guests on each of the servers. I have another 2008 server that i deployed vsphere center on which i created the data store and added the 2 ESXi servers. My storage is a SSD drive using starwind to simulate a NAS drive.
 
Ok, here's my problem, One of my ESXi servers has run out of the 60 day license and on top of that i have crashed my vsphere center server image as well.
So, i deployed a new 2008 virtual server, installed vcenter server and then the vcenter client. I was able to add (or transfer) ESX1 host 1 with 3 guests into the new vcenter server but when i try to add ESXi 2 it wont let me instead asking my to update the license. I can use the vsphere client to log onto ESXi2 host and i can see my 3 guests but how do i get my guests off of the host and onto my new host?. I know it was dumb to let the license expire but i have a lot of work on the 3 guests which without them renders the other 3 guests and the whole project as useless. Any help is much appreciated.
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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I think the export to OVF will work for me and as i have another ESXi server i can crack on with that.
One question from what you said above " you can also re-install ESXi, and preserve the VMFS (datastore with the VMs)". I'm guessing because I lost the first cventer server which had the datastore then i can't actually do this can I?

Thanks mate.
Just noticed, i was reading this
"HOW TO: Install and Configure VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.1 (ESXi 5.1)
 And now see it was written by you dude, great stuff mate - a big help to me and I'm sure many others.
Yes, I've written a series of Basic Articles,  Thanks for your comments.

see my EE Article, Step by Step Tutorial Instructions with Screenshots


Great help. many thanks.