[caption id="attachment_1624" align="aligncenter" width="436" caption="vMA Kernel Panic on Import"]

As it turns out, no manner of tweaks to the virtual machine's virtualization settings nor OS boot/grub settings (i.e. noapic, etc.) seem to cure the ills for vMA. However, we did discover that the OVF deployed appliance was configured as a VMware Virtual Machine Hardware Version 4 machine:
[caption id="attachment_1625" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="vMA 4.1 defaults to Virtual Machine Hardware Version 4"]

Since our lab vMA deployments have all been upgraded to Virtual Machine Harware Version 7 for some time (and for functional benefits as well), we tried to update the vMA to Version 7 and try again:
[caption id="attachment_1626" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Upgrade vMA Virtual Machine Version..."]

This time, with Virtual Hardware Version 7 (and no other changes to the VM), the vMA boots as it should:
[caption id="attachment_1627" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="vMA Booting after Upgrade to Virtual Hardware Version 7"]

Since the Magny Cours CPU is essentially a pair of tweaked 6-core Opteron CPUs in a single package, we took the vMA into the lab and deployed it to an ESX server running on AMD 2435 6-core CPUs: the vMA booted as expected, even with Virtual Hardware Version 4. A quick check of the community and support boards show a few issues with older RedHat/Centos kernels (like vMA's) but no reports of kernel panic with Magny Cours. Perhaps there are just not that many AMD Opteron 6100 deployments out there with vMA yet...