Thanks for the reply, the vCenter Inventory Service is running, has been restarted however the issue goes still unresolved. I'll try resetting the Inventory DB as per that article a little later.
Also to clarify, the vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service is missing, as in: it does not exist in the list of windows services. I can't even try to start it as it's not there... And you are correct with your assumption that vCenter is running within Windows, not as a vApp.