Understanding the hardware health of vSphere hosts

VMware vSphere hosts use the Common Information Model (CIM) instead of installing the hardware agents in the vSphere host Service console. CIM provides some management functions for reporting health information or driver updates. For different installed hardware in the server, VMware provides you with the different CIM providers, for example, HBA, Network cards, Raid Controllers and more. The CIM Broker is used to receive monitoring status from the CIM providers. Once the CIM Broker collects all the status information, it becomes ready to publish all the information, which then can be accessed by APIs.

VMware vCenter Server is capable of presenting this information through the Hardware Status tab, where it provides all the hardware information:

The host health monitoring tool enables you to monitor the health of many hardware components, including memory, temperature, CPUs, voltage, power, network, battery, software, watchdog, storage, and so on.