I couldn’t for the life of me connect to the data recovery virtual appliance. I tried all sorts of things, this forum has a lot of helpful hints…

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/208385?start=0&tstart=0

But this post gave me the answer,

I called into Tech Support and they have confirmed the following:

Vista & Windows 2008 (32bit/64bit) vSphere Client has issues with the Data Recovery Plugin. Sometimes the plugin doesn’t register, sometimes it does. When it does register, you will not be able to connect your Data Recovery appliance. It does however work on XP. Once you’ve registered the appliance from an XP client, and walked through the “Getting Started Wizard” you can access the appliance from the Vista/Windows 2008 vSphere Client without issues (you may need a restart of your vSphere client).

The tech confirmed with an internal VMware BUG ID # 412552.

So I installed the client and plugin on my XP box and lo and behold I could connect. After running through the getting started wizard I could then connect on my 2003 box that has vcenter installed…. so strange but I’m just glad its working. Oh yeah they have a newer version out 1.1