Update:

I installed the appliance as a ovf, also flashed the raid controller into IT mode, and I am now able to create storage pools, etc.

Problem solved!

I have the SAN and NAS Free baremetal .iso installed as Ubuntu guest OS on ESXi host running on Dell Precision T7610 with LSI 2308 RAID controller passed through to VM. SAN and NAS can see the disks but fails to create a pool using the GUI (task fails). Through the cli, I can create a software raid ...