So, for this setup, if you don't mind me asking: When you set up ESXi what did you do for a primary data store? I've got ESXi 6 installed on a USB flash drive currently and I don't see how you can proceed with configuring a VM for XPEnology without a data store. I'm probably overlooking something simple, but ideally, I'd like ESXi to use the XPEnology volume for VM storage if possible. Is that even possible?
I'm running esxi 6 with direct IO as well. I'm booting off thumb drive for esxi. It doesn't natively support onboard sata controllers but I installed a user mod to enable it. I have an SSD off the motherboard sata controller as datastore1. xpenology runs off the SSD configured with small boot vm disk and secondary 32gb vm disk that shows up as volume1 to be the default share for syno apps. I followed the esxi tuturial on here. I have 2 dell 310 8 port cards flashed to IT mode that I passthrough to xpenology. I had to go the sata ssd route since I couldn't use the raid cards as a datastore and as a passthrough device.