You may get the following error when trying to import an OVA or OVF file in the vSphere client “The following manifest file entry (line 1) is invalid: SHA256”. This happens because the vSphere client does not support SHA256. To get around this issue the file needs to be converted to use the SHA1 algorithm.
To do this, you can use OVFTool which is available on all OS at: https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/
To perform the conversion, run this command:
ovftool.exe --shaAlgorithm=SHA1 "/path/to/the/original/ova_file.ova" "/path/to/the/new/ova/file-SHA1.ova"
You can now use the new ova generated with SHA1 for your future deployments without experiencing any format error.