Deploying vMA 4.1

vMA stand for vSphere Management Assistant and the current version is 4.1.  The vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems.  VMware have said that ESX4.1 will be the last version of ESX with a linux service console.  This guide will show you how to deploy the vMA appliance within your Virtual Infrastructure environment.
The vSphere Management Assistant 4.1 Guide document can be downloaded here and is well worth a read.  The vMA is downloaded as a 440mb zip file and can be found here.  A VMware account is required to download the software.
Once you have downloaded the .zip file extract it to a suitable location and log into your vCenter server with the vSphere client.  You can deploy the vMA directly through an ESX host if you don’t have vCenter.  The extracted .zip file contains the following files:

Once in the vSphere client select File and then Deploy OVF Template and then browse to the vMA .ovf template and click Next:

Review the OVF template details and click Next:

Read the EULA and click Accept and the click Next:

Enter a name for the virtual machine and select and inventory location and click Next:

Select a datastore for the .VMDK file to reside on and click Next:

Select the required disk format i.e. thin or thick provisioned and click Next:

Select the network that you would like this VM to be connected to and click Next:

Review the options and click Finish to start the deployment:

The appliance will start to deploy into your environment and should take a couple of minutes:

If the appliance has deployed successfully you will see the following:

You should now have a new VM in your inventory.  In my next article I will go through the set-up of the vMA appliance and how to use it to connect to host’s, specifically ESXi hosts, and perform various functions.