vMA is a pretty stripped down RHEL or CentOS and purpose built for managing VMware infrastructure, depending on the version of vMA you're running, so it does not include traditional tools/utilities one may expect. It's pretty simple to point to a yum repo to install tcpdump or download tcpdump rpm/source. I agree something like tcpdump is extremely useful for debugging/troubleshooting and should be available by default
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William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009,2010
VMware VCP3,4
VMware VCAP4-DCA
VMware scripts and resources at:
Getting Started with the vMA (tips/tricks)
Getting Started with the vSphere SDK for Perl
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
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