Thanks for your reply. I was deploying the vCSA on a NFS datastore mounted with NFS 4.1. The NFS share was provided by an Ubuntu server (nfs-kernel-server). There were problems creating the files on the NFS DS.

2018-12-13T10:55:18.226Z info hostd[2100244] [Originator@6876 sub=DiskLib] DISKLIB-VMFS  : "/vmfs/volumes/1f1d7a8f-5ef53b0c-0000-000000000000/VMware vCenter Server Appliance (P)/VMware vCenter Server Appliance (P)-flat.vmdk" : failed to open (The file specified is not a virtual disk): Size of extent in descriptor file larger than real size. Type 3

2018-12-13T10:55:18.226Z info hostd[2100244] [Originator@6876 sub=DiskLib] DISKLIB-LINK  : "/vmfs/volumes/1f1d7a8f-5ef53b0c-0000-000000000000/VMware vCenter Server Appliance (P)/VMware vCenter Server Appliance (P).vmdk" : failed to open (The file specified is not a virtual disk).

2018-12-13T10:55:18.227Z info hostd[2100244] [Originator@6876 sub=DiskLib] DISKLIB-CHAIN : "/vmfs/volumes/1f1d7a8f-5ef53b0c-0000-000000000000/VMware vCenter Server Appliance (P)/VMware vCenter Server Appliance (P).vmdk" : failed to open (The file specified is not a virtual disk).

2018-12-13T10:55:18.227Z info hostd[2100244] [Originator@6876 sub=DiskLib] DISKLIB-LIB   : Failed to open '/vmfs/volumes/1f1d7a8f-5ef53b0c-0000-000000000000/VMware vCenter Server Appliance (P)/VMware vCenter Server Appliance (P).vmdk' with flags 0x8 The file specified is not a virtual disk (15).

Deployment on another datastore was fine. I found that people have some problems with NFS 4.1, reporting similar issues when booting VMs etc. Deployment on iSCSI or NFS 3 mounted datastore is fine.

Anybody managed to run NFS 4.1 with an Ubuntu (or other Linux) provided NFS share? Same issues I have when mounting NFS 4.1 from Debian. Share configuration is quite simple:

/nfs *(rw,no_root_squash,async,no_subtree_check)

Thanks,

Robert