I have built Hadoop clusters on VMWare – that is not a problem. I think I was using VMware storage connecting to a FreeNAS box.
Hadoop does not do anything special to access the disks. It uses the normal operating system facilities. So long as the diskspace is mounted as if it were a local ext3 filesystem then it should work fine. (I guess there might be some file systems which don’t work with Hadoop)
A quick google tells me
and
https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-Hadoop-Performance-vSphere5.pdf
Goodluck!
