OK thanks for the input. The issue here seems to be that JBOD is making fundamental changes to the design of the VMware compute cluster storage. Whereas before I had a consistent design with all VMFS datastores, I'm throwing in datastores only used by a single vmdk, which belongs to the hadoop VM. No other VMDKs can run on that datastore. If I was using SDRS before for all my datastores, this datastore is now an exception. If I could storage Vmotion from any datastore to any datastore before, now I have to keep track of these exception datastores than run one and only one vm, and can only svmotion to other jbod-ready datastores. Before if I lost a single disk, my raid group rebuilt and the VM kept running. Now if I lose a single disk, even though Hadoop data is not lost, I have to restore a VM from backup to get the VM up again.
Is there a cheap way to do this that still maintains the consistency of the design using EMC storage pools and define an EMC tier of "JBOD LUNs" that have only one disk and then using VMware storage profiles to keep hadoop VMs on these datastores? There has to be some better way....