What brand and model of server is it? Our newer Dell PowerEdge servers iDRAC cards have very good alerting via email and snmp for everything hardware related, including storage events.
Our older Dell Poweredge servers had a client vib installed to a standalone ESXi host that talked to our OpenManage Essentials box which took care of the alerting.
Maybe your server has something comparable that can handle alerting in place of VCenter?
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