So, have VMWare bothered to give you any kind of response yet?
I've just come on to this thread after a wasted week trying to generate and install certificates signed by my own CA, and it's making me scream that not only is vcenter server appliance so badly designed that it requires 7 separate certificates (Why the heck can't it just use one certificate with soft links to it?!), but the documentation is so poor that it's almost impossible to get it to actually work, and now it looks like actually secure certificates cannot be used at all on the ESXi hosts that vCenter is meant to manage.