HP DL380 Gen9 - using it as a temp ESX host

Dear all,

We have a HP DL380 Gen9 server which at the moment is being used as a backup server. We are going to temporarily used it as an ESX server for some time (not permanently), so we want to retain the config of the backup server.

So we thought of doing the below:

1. Turn off server and take out all of its drives
2. We will store the drives somewhere safe and take note to which bay each drive pertained
3. We will install larger disks and configure a new RAID array
4. Once the RAID is setup on the new disks, we will install ESX and perform the required P2V operations etc
5. Once we're finished in a few days time we will take out these disks and reinsert the old disks, expecting that all will load up without doing any other changes.

Should the above work well? that is, should changing the drives retain the configurations etc?

Thank you all

R