Thanks for the help. Unfortunately, even with ports 443 and 902 opened to all ESXi hosts I got the same results.
One note that I didn't mention because I didn't think it would matter but......
the source server has a 1GB nic and the ESXi hosts are all connected to redundant 10Gig uplinks. This is technically a duplex mismatch but since they are Gig I didn't see an issue here. is it?