From what I gather of other threads for other products, I probably should not expect to monitor VSphere physical hosts beyond a simple ping.... true?
You should be able to enable SNMP on your physical host and then do a periodic SNMP GET to retrieve information about your physical host. This works similar to firewalls/routers/switches. This will take some work to map your SNMP correctly, but you can use a SNMP browser to find out what each number means if you are unsure.
Have you done this with vSphere?
