Virtual Machine running on ESX host can be played on vmware player

One of my fellow college contacted me to get help on VMWare. The problem goes like this :
He has a client who is virtual machine running on ESX host. For some reason my college wanted to have same image in different location which is no way connected to client location. He went to our local helpdesk and they gave him suggestion to install ESX and then get the VMDK files from customer location and register it here.
I told we don’t need to build ESX box and we can do it using VMWare player which comes free from VMware.

I suggested them to install VMWare player and then export machine using VM Converter and then ship that image to different location where we can import it into VMware player. It seems like client did not wanted to take that pain. So they told they can only do us favor by giving vmdk/config files rest all we have to do.

I have never tested and was not sure if we can directly copy all the config files from ESX and bring up the VM using VMware player. I planned to test this and to my surprise it worked .

So Can we copy VMDK /Config files and run it using vmware player the answer is YES we can run ESX VM’s on VMWare player