thanks everyone for the replies really appreciate this community! so its not a disaster, the server that runs the freepbx vm is still online. i merged the other vms from the other servers just fine to new xcp-ng servers anyways, i actually have the original vms for all of them still ready to spin up in esxi. so far every single distro lol except this custom Sangoma centos 7 has been good to go nothing else needed.
i think what i will do since the esxi servers are no longer connected to a vcenter appliance is make a copy of the hard disk, stop the original, boot up the copy and see if i cant play around with it with some of the suggestions here. if in fact i do manage to get it working, ill post a 'how i made it work in this instance' thread for anyone else who may encounter it.
in the meantime all suggestions are welcome, im not very versed with boot configurations in linux. im more of a windows systems technician, i can operate *nix just fine and do whatever i need to if the installation is working lol, troubleshooting boot issues has never been something i learned, so crash course engaged.