HELP... ESX 4 U1 Hosts Lock with SD 0:0:0:0 still retrying 0 after 360s

[SandyB]

Hi There

i've got a bit of an urgent issue with one of our production ESX hosts, it has gone offline, the console displays the message "SD 0:0:0:0 still retrying 0 after 360s"

i cant do anything at the console, cant connect via SSH or directly to the host using the VI Client.

Running ESX4 U1 (build 244038) on a Dell R710 connected to an EMC CX3-80 SAN. I cant vMotion the VMs as they are all showing as disconnected and really dont want to power cycle the ESX due to possible dataloss on the VMs

All VMs are still running and accessable using RDP.

I have opened a case with VMware but apparently due to high call volumes it may take 4 hours before they respond....

[DSTAVERT]

Other hosts can connect to the SAN? Are the guests able to read and write to disk? If you have capacity on other hosts you can shutdown the guest machines in the RDP sessions and then add them to other hosts.