storage vMotion fail with "failed to look up vmotion destination resource pool object"

This is a fun one because it's a storage vMotion on FibreChannel - the error message doesn't appear to make much sense. Normally this error indicates a network problem, but if on FC, if you can clearly see both datastores, and open and browse them, you would assume everything is ok.

The host that this was happening on was version 5.0 and had several days of uptime. I suspected the host. I moved the VM to a 5.5 host (that we were migrating to anyways) and the storage vMotion was able to be carried out without problems.

Googling I found that the related KB is 1003734 . Reading it, you find a lot of troubleshooting information for compute, or host-to-host vMotion, but not as much for storage vMotions. I did find this though:

• This issue may be caused by SAN configuration. Specifically, this issue may occur if zoning is set up differently on different servers in the same cluster.

I believe that this may be the problem. I am not sure why I can browse the datastores ok, but since moving it from one host to another solves it, I assume either some service has failed on this long running host on a soon to be unsupported version, or there is indeed a SAN zoning problem.

Hope it helps someone!