Perhaps you should have checked before making a sizable investment in vSphere that what you intended to accomplish was indeed feasible. Did you? If so, with whom and how? If you were given incorrect information, that's one thing; but if you made the assumption that this was supported and easy, then that's on you.
At least do the right thing and provide me with the general ESXi procedures so that we can at least try.
I will not attempt to speak for continuum as he is perfectly capable, but regardless of whether you think it's the "right thing" or not, keep in mind one thing: You've come here with your hat in your hand asking for assistance from a group of volunteers in a community. You've paid nothing for our time or expertise. This space is not an extension of your support contract with VMware (if extant) nor are we (all) VMware employees. You have no entitlement to that time or expertise and all help is done so voluntarily and at the sole discretion of those providing their willful assistance.
Re-creating VMs in vSphere would involve thousands of man-hours and expense.
And at the risk of sounding impertinent, if this is truly the case, perhaps you're developing wrong to begin with. If the delta in time and effort between these snapshots is actually "thousands" of hours, then something is not right here. I don't know what you're developing, how, with what tooling and processes, but it stands to reason that it's worth a look and re-work if this is really the case.
To state plainly: What you're attempting to do is not supported nor is it standard operating procedure. It is therefore a corner use case which may or may not be possible. The ability to move workloads from desktop products, namely Workstation and Fusion, are provided as conveniences and not implicit, supported workflows of cycling between two completely different sets of products with completely different use cases and goals.