I made a USB boot disk and added some extra storage to put the VM's, installed ESXi, and migrated 3 of the Linux powered on VMs.
the redhat one boots, stalls at turn on swap..
the two fedora (10 32 bit ad 14 64bit) both panic early in the boot sequence)..
have to figure out how to debug these.
the tar the drive approach has failed all three times.. it 'might' be volume size related.. still working on alternatives there