I recently deployed version 8 of vRealize Operations in my homelab. My homelab server is based on the SuperMicro X10SDV motherboard, that contains a Xeon D-1518 CPU. This SuperMicro motherboard offers some out of the band management options, and also provides sensor data on how the system is running:

The sensor data provides information on temperature, voltage, fan speeds and physical security.

This sensor information is also available in vRealize Operations, although it is required to first enable the sensor metrics in the active policy:

Select local to enable the four sensor metrics related to fan health and speed and related to temperature and temperature health state.

After you’ve enabled these metrics it might take a while before there’s actual data available. You can browse to one of your ESXi hosts in vRops through the environment tab, and browse the available sensors that are available under the metrics tab.

Notice that the vROPS sensor data is based on the information that is also available in your vCenter Server: select a host, select monitor and select Hardware Health:

In my situation I noticed that the sensor data did not automatically refresh, which resulted in a straight line in the vROPS graphs. After some investigation I notice the CIM service didn’t run, this service is required to refresh the Hardware Health information. This article helped me in solving the issues with the CIM service.

Now we have the metrics available, so we can use them in a dashboard:

This basic dashboard displays three columns:

Column 1 shows some key performance indicators. Column 2 shows the temperatures of CPU, System and DIMM modules; Column 3 shows the FAN speeds of the different fans that are available in the system.

Of course you can add the object list widget to select a specific ESXi host. In this example the information for the only available ESXi host in my lab is displayed. Unfortunately the fan speed shows a percentage (%) while this should be RPM.

I hope this was helpful, feel free to leave a comment.