@trenner Welcome to the Rockstor community.
Your reported issue is an existing inelegance in our dealing with unmet “Minimum system requirements” in our Quick start section:
All drives must have unique serial numbers (real drives do); not all VM systems default to this
Rockstor uses by-id device names which are generated by udev and for these names to be unique udev relies on serial numbers. If they don’t exist there is no ‘uniqueness’ to a drive and hence udev is unable to create the by-id links; bear in mind we, as a drives manager, have to track drives even if they have no partition table / fs (and consequently no uuid). Hence the minimum system requirement. Obviously the messaging need improving as, in the case of the system drive only, we simply fail out with what you have experienced; there are plans to improve this however. In the case of data drives a big red explanation is offered in the disk table. We just need to message better when it’s the system drive.
In the case of vmware I think what you are looking for to configure it in a compatible way with udev / Rockstor is:
disk.EnableUUID="TRUE"
ie:
Hope the helps.