Using/installing the VMware SDK can be a pain in the ass, but as you already have check_esxi_hardware running, I suppose the SDK is working alright.
I just install the check_vmware_esx script like this
git -C /usr/local/src clone https://github.com/BaldMansMojo/check_vmware_esx.git check_vmware_esx
cd /usr/local/src/check_vmware_esx
make all
cp check_vmware_esx /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/
cd -
If you are running a Ubuntu system I found that following this blog entry on replacing the lib-www perl package with an old version(https://www.claudiokuenzler.com/blog/650/slow-vmware-perl-sdk-soap-request-error-libwww-version) and installing haveged solves problems with script timeouts. On CentOS systems those don’t seem to be necessary.
This is taken from the docs: https://icinga.com/docs/icinga2/latest/doc/05-service-monitoring/#vmware-monitoring
Other than that the script normally works pretty good.
Recently I have tried the Icinga Web 2 vspheredb module, which gives you a nice overview about your hosts/vms/clusters. But the checks you can run against the module are still very basic, and I have no idea what they will do, if something fails.