The otelcol-contrib process crashes during VM metric collection from a vCenter instance with a nil pointer dereference in buildVMMetrics. It appears to be caused by an unexpected nil in the VM object returned by the vSphere API (likely vm.Config.Hardware or vm.Summary fields).

Logs:
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
goroutine 147 [running]:
go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/trace.(*recordingSpan).End(...)
github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/receiver/vcenterreceiver.(*vcenterMetricScraper).buildVMMetrics
processors.go:310
github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/receiver/vcenterreceiver.(*vcenterMetricScraper).processVMs
processors.go:228
...

Config
receivers:
vcenter:
endpoint: https://
username: ...
password: ...
collection_interval: 60s
insecure: true

processors:
batch:

exporters:
prometheus:
endpoint: "0.0.0.0:9464"

service:
pipelines:
metrics/vcenter:
receivers: [vcenter]
processors: [batch]
exporters: [prometheus]

Request
Please guard against nil dereferences in buildVMMetrics to avoid crashing the entire collector. A panic on one VM should not take down the pipeline.