ESXi, 6.0.0, 3620759
vSphere Appliance 6.5U1
Browser: Chrome Version 60.0.3112.113
All I'm trying to do is export a VM to an OVF. Simple, right? We were having problems with version 6.0 of the appliance (continual SSL certificate warnings etc) so decided to update vSphere to version 6.5U1. Unfortunately, this is proving to be a disastrous decision as it is worse (more buggy) that 6.0!
OK, using the flash web client, I get "This version of vCenter Server does not support Export OVF Template ... [blah]... login with version 6.5.0.0 of vSphere Web Client". What gives? I AM using version 6.5 already. So, I hope over to KB2151085 which tells me to rename ts-config.properties.rpmnew to ts-config.properties. But, I don't have a ts-config.properties.rpmnew file. I have tried this method about 8 times.
OK, let's try the HTML5 web client. This one shows a bit more promise, but usually bombs out about half way through the export (or doesn't start). (Sorry, I forget the error in the browser. vSphere just gets stuck at 50% and I have to cancel the job.) I have tried this method about 10 times. NOTE: Sometimes, just for fun, the web client does nothing when I click the OK button.
I have tried clearing the serenity database and rebooting vSphere. That didn't seem to do any harm, but it actually made no different whatsoever to the inability to export.
OK, how about Firefox v52? Nope - that just gives the old repeated SSL certificate - "restart Firefox" error. I'd hoped that was a thing of the past, but it looks like features not fixes are de rigeur at VMware these days. (It was this error that were were trying to get away from.)
Finally, I have tried OVF tool. I think ovf tool is designed just to spit out "sorry, computer says no" errors. I'm not going to list them, but they are all syntax errors. Can't find this or that. TBH, I read about 1% of the 874,653 page manual and lost the will to live. (The truth is that I couldn't justify spending a week of my job reading a manual.)
In the end, I am reminded of cobol programmers. (Yup, I remember them - I was one once!) As fewer and fewer people abandoned the sinking ship "Cobol", the ones that stuck with it got more expensive and reveled in ever more arcane code and higher fees - and they became ever more defensive about the dying language! 
I'm out of ideas and almost out of willpower. If I say to the "powers that be", we have to reinstall vSphere from scratch, I know that they will ask me why we persist with something that requires such a huge operational overhead instead of migrating to some other product that just works. So, I'm really hoping someone has a simple fix to this. (Yes, I could just copy the raw files, but that's not really a fix.)
