The hard disk is blank.

[Algebraic]

I'm trying to create a datastore in vSphere 6.0 Client and receiving the message:  The hard disk is blank.  The system sees my RAID and identifies the correct capacity on it (21.83 TB), assigns a device under /vmfs/devices/disks/, and so on. 

At first the exposed device had no partition and partedUtil threw some glibc errors when I tried using it over SSH on the ESXi host.  I booted my system with a live Ubuntu USB and used parted there to add a gpt partition covering 100% of the RAID. 

Booting back to ESXi, I still get the same results, even with the partition already in place.  The 'Add Storage' window finds the device, identifies capacity, displays the /vmfs/device/disks/eui... location, and says The hard disk is blank.

Eventually it displays the following error, but I have not found any working solutions thus far. 

Call "HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions" for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "192.168.1.191" failed.

This is my first time working with ESXi/vSphere.  Where do I go from here?

[Algebraic · Accepted solution]

After more searching, it seems this might be related/causing the issue: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=207907...

Is the 4k volume size still an issue in vSphere 6?  If so, it seems the solution is to rebuild the RAID with 512-byte sectors.

[Algebraic]

It appears the 4k size was the issue.  I rebuilt the RAID with 64-bit LBA as a RAID0 so I could test it right away.  Worked just fine in vSphere Client.  Time for a rebuild.