With all due respect, your answer is (a) not correct; and (b) not helpful.
Nowhere is it mentioned that deploying vCD through ESXi is not supported. When you apply some logic to it, why would it not be supported? What would the resultant VM run on? Why the ESXi host itself! Whether I deploy through ESXi or vCenter, it should not make a difference.
Anyway, I finally got around to resolving this myself. So for those who may be stuck deploying any OVA/OVF directly to an ESXi host, this official VMware ovftool document says:
"If you are deploying with the ovftool command targeting an ESXi host, you must “inject” the parameters into the resulting VM when it is powered on. This is because the ESXi host lacks a cache to store the OVF parameters, as with vCenter Server. Therefore, you must use the --X:injectOvfEnv debug option with the --poweron flag in the command line"
The direct link is here: Online Documentation - OVF Tool User's Guide (U2) - VMware {code}
So once I added the two additional parameters, everything worked a treat.
