Thanks I have looked at these and nothing stands out that would point me in the correct direction and they are mainly talking about iscsi.

Something interesting though, i just rebooted the open-e server again and now one of the ESX4 servers should both Fibre Channel paths as active with one used for (I/O) which is correct and the Other ESX4 server shows both as dead. It seems that the first server that connects with the volume takes control.

Interestingly we also have two ESX3.5 servers looking at the same volume and these work correctly as each server has an active path and a stanby which is correct for this version of ESX.

So it seems the problem is open-e with esx4, please anymore help would be appreciated.