vMA missing libraries

If you are using vMA (vSphere Management Assistant) for some specific management tasks like UPS monitoring  or running a scheduled backup script from cron daemon, you may experience an error similar to this one:

Can't load '/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/libvmatargetlib_perl.so'
for module vmatargetlib_perl: libtypes.so: cannot open shared object
file: No such file or directory at
/usr/lib64/perl5/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 230.
at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/VMware/VmaTargetLib.pm line 10
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/VMware/VIFPLib.pm line 10.

A reason for such  behaviour is typically caused by some misunderstandings how shell environment in vMA is configured. The most common mistake is testing the affected script with sudo which strips out some environment variables - especially LD_LIBRARY_PATH - due to some security restrictions. Otherwise, the error shouldn't appear because /etc/bashrc exports vmware SDK library path implicitly:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/vmware/vma/lib64:/opt/vmware/vma/lib

So in  case of sudo or other unspecified scenarios throwing the presented error try to create a wrapper script which explicitly exports a list of directories where to search for ELF libraries again:

#!/bin/bash

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/vmware/vma/lib64:/opt/vmware/vma/lib  
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

/path/to/original-script "$@"

exit $?