VMware ESXi 6.0 and Openstack

I use the data coming out of the (i)DRAC, combined with the data that ESXi harvests via CIM, with vCenter configured to alert on faults coming out of the CIM monitoring.

I'm a little unclear on what you're saying about the trustworthiness of the CIM data, but I personally trust it a heck of a lot more than I would trust the SNMP traps being fed to WhatsUp. CIM will catch and throw alerts on something as minor as low voltage on the BIOS battery, as long as your hardware is well supported (as recent Dell equipment is), and vCenter is pretty flexible about choosing what, where, and how often you throw alerts on those events.

There's a lot of ways to do this, it depends on how paranoid you want to be about it.

If you're already trunking VLANs up to one or more Port Groups on a VM vSwitch and are happy to live with the security of VLAN separation then you can use the simplest method. This is just to create a new Port Group, assign it the appropriate VLAN ID and add the W2K8 VM's vNIC to that Port Group - that's all, told you it was easy.

If you already have a 'VLAN-gnostic' vSwitch/Port Group that everything else uses then simply enter the appropriate 'default' VLAN ID in that Port Group's VLAN setting, this shouldn't impact the existing VMs. Then just create a new Port Group for the W2K8 VM, assign it the right VLAN ID and point the W2K8 VM's vNIC at that new Port Group.

If you want physical cable separate just link a spare ESXi host NIC to the switch, set the switch to trunk the W2K8 VM's new VLAN, then create a new vSwitch linked to that NIC, then create a new Port Group with the new VLAN ID set as that Port Group's VLAN and point the W2K8 VM's vNIC at that new Port Group and its underlying new vSwitch.

If you want a something else you'll need to let us know more.

Oh and the W2K8 VM is a 'guest' not a 'host, ESXi is the host.