The very first post at the beginning of this thread explicitly states that you need a second SATA controller. I have found this to be true, as adding a drive to the primary SATA controller results in the system not seeing the drive at all.
I used the most recent 3617xs OVA supplied on Page 5, got a successful boot of the system, and it sees the drive I added to the second controller, but it fails to format.
The OVA instructions did not specify the second controller, but I find having the disk attached to the original control does not resolve the issue. See the below screenshots.
When I add the drive to the second controller, it is detected, but it can not be formatted.
Some extra info: I live and breath VMWare. It's a key part of my career. Primary/Secondary controller should not matter. The issues with primary/secondary are purely related to the bootloader in use. If I manually deploy the 3615xs build, I'm able to make it work with the two controller method, but not the single controller method.