No backup is never good!
Anyways, your best bet is install VMWare ESXi again and import that OVF file - it should work in the same version of ESXi.
Test it!
Then shutdown the VM, and copy the .vmdk file to a NAS or USB stick…
Reinstall Proxmox.
Use either XFS or ZFS as file system.
Create a new VM with the GUI, with the same Specs as in VMWare. Don’t use CPU sockets, use only cores in Proxmox. And leave the CPU to the default in Proxmox, KVM64. Deactivate the firewall in the new VMs NIC.
When the VM is created, don’t start it!
Copy the .vmdk file into the storage where Proxmox creates it’s VM
(eg: /var/lib/vz/images/vmid)
Rename the original Proxmox VMdisk (eg vm-100-disk-0.raw to vm-100-disk-0.raw_old
run the convert command:
qemu-img convert -O raw image.vmdk image.raw
Adapt the disk names accordingly.
As the target (image.raw) use the original name Proxmox used…
Since the converted disk has the same name proxmox used - it’s all correctly in the VM config of Proxmox and should now boot up…
Start the VM…
Good luck.
My 2 cents
Andy