🧩 Problem

I had several Windows VMs running in VMware Workstation 25H2 on my Windows PC and wanted to migrate them across to my ESXi 8 host (esx03) for centralized management under vCenter.

Along the way I hit two blockers in sequence:

  1. vmx-22 hardware family not supported during OVF import into ESXi 8

  2. vTPM encryption requirement — the VM failed to create because it had a virtual TPM but VM encryption wasn’t configured on the standalone host