I was just about to report back regarding direct connection to the host OVF deployment is in fact working (post-patching) now so your reply is very timely, thanks for helping.
In my case there were still a number of hoops to jump through to get it working, one was I had to ditch IE for chrome and then install a newer version of flash on my machine (which oddly enough prompted me to reboot) and after direct connection to a host using the chrome browser I was able to deploy the OVF (finally), IE actually complained that the OVF exceeded 4GB so Chrome was the only path forward anyway.
Another thing to add is that when I deploy the OVF via direct connection to the host and the OVF first starts to deploy I notice in the task list the following:
Task: Reconfig VM Initiator : VC Internal Result: 'Failed - the operation is not allowed in the current state'
This error is then immediately followed by other tasks: Upload disk (which is the VMDK of the OVF) and 'Import VApp'.
Finally at this point the upload of the VMDK took far longer than it typically does which had me expecting it to fail right at the end but it was ok and booted fine.
For an OVF of this size 13GB I am typically able to deploy it in 30 minutes or so, but this took nearly 5 hours to deploy. So there's apparently some I/O issue going on here or some interference due to vcenter being in this mix but I'm happy to at least report that it finally works. The time is problematic but as a workaround I can deploy something before I leave work every night, convert it to a template once it's on there and should be ok.
Cheers.
