First- I am using the same hardware for this but looking to expand usage of the hardware by running ESXi.
I have converted a machine from Physical to Virtual and installed ESXi 5.1 and now the system wants to reactivate without success. I have set SMBIOS.reflecthost = TRUE on the system but it still is trying to activate without success. For testing I have moved the system files to a ESXi 4.1 machine and was able to boot without issue but this will not work on the 5.1 system that it is supposed to run on, especially since it is an OEM and it needs to remain on the correct hardware. The "Upgrade Virtual Hardware" option was present in the vSphere client and I did this as well. I cannot install the VMWare Tools as I cannot get past the Activation screen. This is a Windows 2003 system running on a Dell PE2950. Any ideas as to what else I can try to resolve the issue?