Using VMware : How do I see drives?

Huh? Are your physical disks mapped to the VM via RDM? If not, how should you be able to see them?

Greetings
David

I am not 100% sure about this, but I believe that you cannot RDM a partition, but only a whole disk. So

The thing you want is not really working...

Yes, if you want to see the physical drives in ESXi VM, you have 2 options:
1. Use RDM (Raw Disk Map), you may find a lot of guide on Google about how-to;
2. If your hardware is able of VT-d (need motherboard, CPU, BIOS support), you can use "PCI pass through" functionality to route a storage controller to VM, ESXi is much simple to configure pass through;

But still you cannot RDM a partition, only a full drive.

Someone needs to own the drive - either ESXi or the VM. Having two different authorities on one drive will not work.

So you can not use partition 1 of a physical drive in ESXi to create a data store and partition 2 of the same physical drive to put it through via RDM to a vm.

of cause RDM is not for partition, based on its full name - Raw Disk Mapping, it's totally for disk. If OP's intention is to use hypervisor's disk where host OS installed, I don't think there is an available option.