vms are not responding on host and esxcli command not working

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

An ESXi host running version 8.0.3 is experiencing issues where esxcli commands are not responding. This appears to be due to the hostd service being unresponsive. The host's storage is connected via a Cisco FNIC FCoE adapter.

Environment

ESXI 8.0.3

Cause

storage communication issue 
No IO from the device, and noticed an issue with the vmhba2 path, and repeated FNIC aborts were observed, leading to continuous path switching.

Resolution

Storage communication was refreshed by executing the command

localcli storage san fc reset -A vmhba2.

Following this, the hostd and vpxa services on the ESXi host were restarted.