OK. To bring this to a close... There were some casualties, but ultimately I was able to salvage a dozen or so virtual machines using the "qemu-img convert -O vmdk vmdiskfile vmdiskfile.vmdk" command. In case anyone else finds themself in a similar situation, this involved the following steps: 1) Give up on the hosted-engine. 2) SSH into RHEV and navigate to the VM storage domain. 3) Go into each UUID folder and run # qemu-img convert -O vmdk vmdiskfile vmdiskfile.vmdk 4) Secure-copy vmdiskfile_converted.vmdk to VMware. 5) SSH onto the VMware host. 6) Run # vmkfstool -i vmdiskfile.vmdk new_file_name.vmdk. 7) Attach new_file_name.vmdk to a new VM in VMware. Make sure "Firmware" is set to "BIOS", under Edit Settings > VM Options > Boot Options. 8) Boot the VMware VM, and Windows should automatically load and you should be good to start removing the RHEV-related VM tools and install the VMware tools. ** Note: Remember my situation involved migrating away from RHEV over to VMware. So, I really wasn't concerned about recovering the hosted-engine. And, prior the hosted-engine going down, in preparation to migration to VMware I had already removed all snapshots from all RHEV VMs. This all made what's below possible, and a lot easier. Also, these steps didn't always work. I was able to recover 75% of Windows VMs. Unfortunately, I experienced a 100% lost for Linux VMs.