vMA is a VMware RHEL5 (Redhat 5) virtual appliance that provides an environment similar to that of the classic ESX Service Console for centralized management and configuration of your ESX/ESXi host(s). vMA includes both the vCLI and vSphere SDK for Perl along with logging component called "vilogger" and authentication component called "vi-fastpass". 

Update: Tips and Tricks with vMA 5.0

Check out the Getting started with vMA guide!

Here are some interesting scripts found on vMA:

The first tool is called bulkAddServers.pl which allows a user to specify a list of host(s) and providing a username/password once and the script will automatically import the entire list, without having to add each host manually and providing the credentials each time. [this works very if you have common account across all your host(s)].

The script is stored in: /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/bulkAddServers.pl

Sample file containing host(s) to add:

[[email protected] ~]$ cat hosts_to_add
everest.primp-industries.com
himalaya.primp-industries.com

Sample execution of adding two host(s):

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/bulkAddServers.pl --filename hosts_to_add
Do you want to use the same password for all of the hosts (yes/no) : yes
Enter common root password:
All Targets Added Successfully.

Verify host(s) have been added:

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo vifp listservers
everest.primp-industries.com ESX
himalaya.primp-industries.com ESX

The next tool is primarly to help user's execute a command or series of command across a set of ESX(i) host(s), in the past you would need to manually do this for each of the manage host(s) with the vCLI/RCLI tools, say to add/update portgroup on a vSwitch for example. This can be pretty redudant and you could write a quck for loop to do this but VMware wrote a script called mcli which allows a user to execute a command and it's argument against a set of host(s) listed in a file.

The script is stored in: /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/mcli.pl

[[email protected] ~]$ /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/mcli.pl --help
Invalid arguments
Usage:
./mcli

Sample file containing host(s) to execute command against

[[email protected] ~]$ cat hosts_to_execute_cmd_on
everest.primp-industries.com
himalaya.primp-industries.com

Sample execution to check for syslog configuration

[[email protected] ~]$ /opt/vmware/vima/samples/perl/mcli.pl hosts_to_execute_cmd_on esxcfg-syslog --show
everest.primp-industries.com:
No remote syslog server configured.
himalaya.primp-industries.com:
No remote syslog server configured.