I have been told that I can not use vCenter Converter or the Standalone Converter to convert a VHD file to vmdk. file to use to create a VM on vCenter ESXi host. Is that correct? I thought that this was possible or is it only possible directly from a running hyper-V virtual machine?
You can - check out page 47 of http://www.vmware.com/pdf/convsa_51_guide.pdf
not sure that was helpful. The procedure requires that the VHD exists in the hyper-v VM. What I am interested in is taking the VHD file and converting that to VMDK so that I can then use it with a VMware VM.
you are correct - I am just used to doing it from a Hyper-V server - you can also use a disk utility called winimage - check out this http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-convert-and-import-vhd-to-vmdk-vmware/
You can use several tools, most of them are free.
I wrote a post on my blog with four ways to do the conversion:
VMWare: Convertir vhdx en vmdk | SYSADMIT
My favorite is: qemu-img for Windows, it's also explained in the blog post.
qemu-img for Windows is free, portable and it runs via command-line.
VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V disk image types are all supported.
For example, to convert VHDX to VMDK:
qemu-img.exe convert C:\SYSADMIT-Image\SYSADMIT-Image.vhdx -O vmdk C:\SYSADMIT-Image\SYSADMIT-Image.vmdk