I must Vent. vCloud Director was not designed and built with any common sense. You are correct, the dumb portal wants to clone VMs for any operation from a move to an import. It is ridiculous! When all you want to do is make a simple "move" of a VM from one vApp to another, in vCenter you would have just dragged and dropped the VM from one Resource Pool to another, that is all vCD should be doing. But no, it wants to first clone the VM but wait if you have a 10 VM limit on the virtual datacenter with 10 VMs, it fails because you need 11 VM limit. Then it fails because you won't have enough storage allocated to the virtual datacenter. Then once the clone has completed, your VM now most likely has different network settings and just blew up your server's applications, domain and trusts.
I can't understand why VMware has not put more effort into this management platform. About the only thing it offers of any value you the virtual console proxy. Why don't they just port it to the vCenter web portal architecture? I could replace vCD in that case since the allocation and quota management in VCD is so screwed up, I would prefer to not have it at all.