Hello,
WIthout knowing the actual version of the hosts involved, suggesting an upgrade is somewhat dangerous. Some upgrades do not work on older hardware, etc. As for remove the E1000 adapters from the VM, that also sounds odd to me. I have blades (BL460c gen10 and everything from gen7) and e1000 has never been an issue. Storage has been an issue from time to time, memory, even a missing heat sink, but never the the e1000.
Since this impacts multiple hosts, it could be VM moved around the hosts (logging will tell us that), or it could be something with specific cluster communication . Since most 'lock' messages are about storage in the logs, that is generally where I first look. But this sounds more like a crash dump mesage than a log message. Log messagees about locks would be extremely helpful here
At this time the landscape is too broard to pinpoint a potential solution.
Best regards,