I recently restored a vmware guest running on ESXi from a symantec backup exec 2010 system. Once the VM was restored, it lost its windows and office activation. I tried restoring it again trying both the "I copied it" and "I moved it" options that vmware presents you with. This was a backup of a VM running on the same ESXi host, restored back to the same ESXi host. Is there no way to recover VM guests and retain activation? I even tried using manual copies of the original VM config using only the restored disk image, but still no luck. Any other options? Would VM converter be of any use here? Taking the restored VM and getting it working on the ESXi host without losing activation?
