Hi,
Can you please share the SR number?
vSphere Replication attempts to use all hosts in the vCenter inventory (for accessing target datastores or potentially replicating source VMs from them). Currently there is no way to limit VR to only subset of the hosts.
The VIB contains firewall rules so that source ESXi can send replication traffic to tunneling agent in the VR appliance in case of replications to vCloud Air.
Opening port 8043 at the source ESXi is not required - the download of the VIB goes through the vCenter reverse proxy (which by default runs on http port 80). The log message does not provide information about the vCenter reverse proxy address used.
Regards,
Martin