I had this case on Sunday.
Checked /var/log/messages and confirmed the disk is being detected and attached to the appliance.
Here are the messages from my support call creating a 10GB Disk
sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] 21474836480 512-byte logical blocks: (10.9 TB/10.0 TiB)
sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 61 00 00 00
sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Cache data unavailable
sd 0:0:1:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Not alot of data during boot up to work with here. http://stingray.corp.netapp.com/2006261725/sysdump-dc1vapavault1-20160425-093406/dmesg
Question, I noticed when the VM boots up vCenter reports the vmtools are not installed which makes sense. My suggestion to the customer was to use a RDM disk instead of VMDK thinking the passthrough disk would be managed by the storage layer on the appliance instead of abstracted through vmware.
Would RDM make a difference here ?