I did a local-based conversion from on an old Dell 2450 to ESXi yesterday. Since the change in visible hardware is obviously significant enough and caused the KMS to spit out "KMS license expired or hardware out of tolerance" as a message whenever I do "slmgr.vbs -dlv," this required re-activation of the KMS via "slmgr.vbs -ato." However, now whenever I do "slmgr.vbs -dlv" it tells me that the status is "licensed" but there's no current client activation count. When I have Vista clients try to connect to the server, the clients get a message that KMS can't be reached. A packet trace clearly reveals that connection to TCP 1688 is made and that RPC transactions are taking place. There's apparently something wrong with the KMS.

Has anyone else had this issue? I really don't want to have to go through a KMS license key reinstall since I can't seem to locate ours.