I have been backing up VMs at my company using VM standalone and its worked great for what we are trying to do. However since we are saving these templates to a laptop, the templates are not copying the networks, pci cards etc. Is there a way to save the ESXI configurations so that we do not have to keep going back in and taking 20 minutes to reconfigure each ESXI and its VMs. I have done some research and have found something regarding vCLI but I cannot seem to get it to work. Can you simply just copy the files through WinSCP and deploy them? Any help would be appreciated.
Since you are backing up to a laptop, I'd suggest that you install PowerCLI, and do the ESXi configuration backup this way.
You can find the required steps, and commands at e.g. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2042141
André