unable to start or delete VMs

[Sniglet]

Some of the VMs on several of my ESXi 5.1 server are starting to fail. They give errors about not being able to use the file system when I try and start them. Worse, I can't even delete these VMs and get a "general system" error when I attempt to remove them (see error message details below).

Does anyone have any suggestions about what I can do to resolve these issues? I find it hard to believe that this is from disks going bad since this is happening on more than one ESXi host which are using different storage devices.

Is there a way to delete these VMs? I have tried placing the ESXi host into maintenance mode but that doesn't help. I still get errors trying to delete files from the datastore.

Here is the error I get when trying to start a failed VM:

Here is the error I see when trying to delete a failed VM:

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Just to clarify, you're getting these errors for different hosts that also use different datastores?  Is the storage shared or local to the hosts?  All the same kind of hosts and storage?

[Sniglet]

Yes, I am getting failed VMs on at least two ESXi hosts, each of which have only a local datastore. They are identical HP Proliant servers and disks.

[Davoud Teimouri]

Hi friend,

Test it, remove VMs from inventory, reboot your hosts and then add them to your inventory.

Maybe the VMDKs are locked by hosts.

BR