Running a vmware workstation 9 image on ESXi 5.1

Hi,

I have a Win Server 2008 vmware image that I'm able to run on a 64bit Ubuntu PC running vmplayer. According to vmplayer it's a workstation 9 image.

I also have vm workstation 8 32bit running on a Win7 32bit PC, but I'm unable to run the image here, presumably because the host is only 32bit.

I now wish to run the image on a 64bit server running ESXi 5.1. I know there are steps to export a workstation image to ESXi via workstation, but can my 32 bit vm workstation convert a 64bit image? What are my options?

Thanks!