On all distributed port groups I disabled all security settings and set everything to promiscuous.
I've got a setup I built where I have three virtualized ESXi hosts. Their management vmkernels were on a standard vswitch - everything worked like a champ. They could ping each other, they could ping out to my physical default gateway. No problems.
I migrated their managament vmkernels to a distributed switch that each of them have, they can still ping out to the default gateway, but they can no longer ping each other. I'm still working at it but at a complete loss as to how they could be able to ping the default gateway but not be able to ping each other.