We just received a copy of the BDE 6.01.00 DVD and have a question.
What version of WMware is the minimum to load the virtual machine images ? It is indicated in the documentation WMware 7 or similar ? What is similar ?
We have WMware ESX Server,,3.5.0,110268 and are running into problems.
We can load the CM image but not start it. We receive an error: "Device 'Hard Disk 1' has a backing type that is not supported. This is a general limitation of the host."
The AES image does not even load. WMware reports that it is invalid (the image).
We are planning to upgrade our WMware server to version 5.0 and hope it will fix this, but it would be good to know if it is likely to work.

I did all the testing using VMWare Workstation version 7. By itself without running through a conversion tool available on the VMWare web site the template you have will not run on ESX.

I have given the template to people who have run it through template conversion tools available from VMWare and they have run the image on ESX version 4.1 and are testing it on version 5.0 without issue. I do not know the details of what they needed to do associated with the conversion process.

This is a good answer.

We have downloaded VMware vCenter Converter 5.0 and are trying to get this to work. According to the WMware website the conversion has to go thru a VMware vCenter Server when converting to the product WMware ESX or ESXi.

We will post again the results when we manage to get this working.

We managed to get this working by setting up a separate ESXi server and then use the converter.
Both BDE CM and AES are running fine.
It is not recommended that anyone use ESX for this.

However now we have an issue with the license.
I will create a techical support request for that in a minute.

After checking the technical support section we noticed that there doesn't seem to be an option to request techical support for BDE so we will try for license activation via email.

You should have received email in response to the BDE procurement with the license files for BDE that handle the September- end of year interval.

Thanks for the answer.
We received an email on October 10 with .pdf files, a serial number and a password. No .xml license files.
Did we forget something ?

do you have the procurement number?

Found it... PROCUREM02344