How to do this is explained in this article. It is also possible to import the appliance from the command line with VMware's OVF Tool, which is available for Linux and Windows.
But you would always need the vSphere Client on Windows at least once after installation of ESXi to for example import the vCenter Virtual Appliance ( explained here) Or to create a virtual machine. There are a few tools that you can use to make administration for your environment simpler. So what do you do when your vCenter server is down or what to do if you only have one ESXi server? The only problem with that is that it only works with vCenter. And you can access that from your Linux system and Mac OS X. The longer answer is: do you need one? And is there an alternative? For most day to day operations you should move to the vSphere Web Client. If you are using a Linux-based pc or Mac OS X and want to manage a vSphere-environment then you might ask yourself the question if there is a native OS-version of the vSphere Client available for your platform.
