VM to widows desktop...

This is probably not possible, but....

I have a custom installed Windows 8.1 VM image that is working just fine. Since I have some problems with the Windows 7 host desktop, I am planning to do the below, instead of fixing the host.

Create a Macrium image within the virtual Windows 8.1 machine and restore the image to a new drive.

The main reason for looking for this venue, I really don't feel like to reinstall Windows 7 and all of the applications that I'd need.

So, is this possible?
TIA...

The short answer is yes, moving virtual system to physical system does work...

I've created a Macrium backup image from within Windows 8.1 VMware virtual machine and restored it with Macrium to an SSD drive I had laying around.

While Macrium recommends preparing the image to restore on different hardware, that process was not used. After reboot, Windows 8.1 re-detected some of the new hardware and started up.

Windows 8.1 did not require reactivation; this might be due to the fact that most of devices drives that would impact reactivation did not change.

Issues...

MS Office 2013 required reactivation, after proceeding online, it stopped complaining.

The video card was not detected correctly and AMD/ATI software took care of that, the resolution with two monitors is 3,820x1,200 and the taskbar is stretched across the two screens. The latter one was not possible in Windows 7...

The system has "Standard SATA AHCI Controller" for the IDE/ATAPI controllers, via MS driver dated back to 2006. Generally, all of the devices have MS drivers from 2006, including the Intel Z77 chipset. Others like the USB 3.0 controller, sound and video, etc., have drivers by MS from 2013 and later. The chances are that replacing the MS drivers would result in a faster system, but may require reactivation for W8.1. That may also trigger reactivation for MS Office 2013 and other licensed software. And that might be a problem online...

As such, the proper order should've been:

1. Restore Windows 8.1 from the image
2. Update device drivers specific to the new machine
3. Reactivate Windows 8.1 OS
4. Reactivate MS Office and other software

For the time being, I'll use the system as is to see what else might come up...

Not much else came up, even after uninstalling VMware drivers. Reactivating Windows wasn't as simple, mainly because it wasn't easy to locate the product key. But it's done, Windows 8.1 from virtual to physical machine is now my main system...