In the first chapter, we saw that we can manage the ESXi host or virtual machine by VMware vCenter Server. In some situations, some operations and configurations cannot execute in vCenter Server; for example, if one virtual machine stops responding, the VMware administrator can normally reboot that virtual machine using vSphere Client. However, they cannot reboot and shut down this virtual machine in vCenter Server. The solution is to force a reboot or shut it down using the command line. VMware vMA is a useful tool, which is a virtual appliance. It is a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11-based virtual machine that includes the VMware CLI and vSphere SDK for Perl. System administrators can run scripts that interact with ESXi hosts and vCenter Server systems.
The following is the procedure for deploying VMware vMA:
Download vMA from the VMware website (https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads). Choose VMware vSphere version 5.1 as the product, go to the Drivers & Tools tab...