setup confirmation: esxi cluster, is both the pcns appliance and vma required?

[Emanresu]

Hi, trying to confirm on the setup that a former colleague did: for an esxi cluster with three hosts, any reason to deploy both the vMA and the PCNS appliance vm? from a glance at the current configuration, the PCNS appliance seems to be configured to talk to the ESXi cluster directly. I don't see where the vMA would come into play or be useful. No trace of the vMA being mentioned in the PCNS webinterface. What could the vMA possibly be needed for, where would it have to be configured to be used?

[BillP]

@Emanresu 

Depending on the version of ESXi and PCNS, you will not need the vMA. Since the release of PCNS 3.1, we have offered an OVA. The OVA is a Linux OS with PCNS bundled with it. Before PCNS version 3.1, you were required to install VMware vMA and install PCNS onto it. 

 PCNS 4.4.x is not supported on VMware vMA.

The last version of VMware vMA is 6.5 and that has been depreciated. 

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/04/vsphere-management-assistant-deprecation.html