it appears that the vsphere client (5.1) won’t allow you to format a disk as VMFS if the disk already has existing partitions. however, you can SSH into an ESXi host and use the partedUtil command to alter the partitioning. previously fdisk was used for this purpose, but has evidently since been deprecated.

disk information here: /vmfs/devices/disks/

in my case the disk was listed as naa.(long string)
so i first used partedUtil get “/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.(long string)” to list the partitions
then i used partedUtil delete “/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.(long string)” 1
and
partedUtil delete “/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.(long string)” 2
to delete the existing partitions

i was then able to use the vsphere client to format the disk as VMFS

more info concerning partedUtil here:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1036609

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