We recently had some downtime to physically move a rack for our server room expansion. One of the servers we were shutting down was a VMware ESX host. When I tried to resume the machine, I received an error saying “Module DevicePowerOn power on failed. Unable to open the SCSI device . . .”
We had removed a daisy chained tape device, and I forgot! I wanted to remove it from the hardware profile, but I couldn’t because the machine was suspended.
So  . . . , I can’t power on, I can’t power down, and I can’t edit the hardware profile because the machine is suspended. Crap.
I sshed into the ESX box and tried: vmware-cmd stop hard. I received the error : “The attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state . . .”.
Crap.
The only way I could get the machine powered on, was to comment out the missing scsi device in the VM’s vmx file. After that, I could power on the machine no problem. Hope that may help someone!
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