Hello and thanks for the response!
The storage is three 3TB Toshiba (Hitatchi) SATA drives attached directly to the ESXi server. The drives are attached to the onboard SATA controller like the 500GB datastore drive is. The server uses USB flash for the boot drive. This is a home budget setup, I'll leave the highend stuff for work. ;-)
The RDM's are there, however no OS will see the drives 'correctly'. They all 'see' the drives but can't 'use' them. FreeNAS shows an 'unsupportable block size' error. Sometimes the block size is some random number other times it is 0. This leads me to believe that ESXi is not allowing the VM to access the drive properly.
A Windows Server 2008R2 VM will not allow the drives to initilize however it does see them as there. I've also tried OpenIndiana and others with the same results. Most everything can see the drives but can't use them.
The ultimate end goal is allowing the VM to use the drives as a RAIDZ setup for home media storage.
I use VMWare at work often, but I'm not entirely versed on the log files. I'll do some research and see if there are any errors there.
EDIT: I installed FreeNAS directly onto the ESXi server using a flash drive and the OS was able to see, read, and create the ZFS filesystem properly. The drives work perfectly fine and my problem is *definitely* an issue with ESXi server. For whatever reason the hard drives are not being passed correctly to the FreeNAS OS using the RDM's. Anyone know how to fix this so the access is physical and my setup will work?