Unable to create PV against local storage

Good afternoon all,

We are installing a single node OpenShift CRC cluster backed purely by local storage for proof of concept, evaluation, and internal training purposes before taking bigger steps and updating from an Ovirt to an OpenShift environment.

Some of the software we are evaluating is supported only under OpenShift 4.10, so that is the version we have installed, with crc build 2.6.0+d606e64 .

The environment is a bare metal server with 72 GB RAM and 24 cores running a recent (6 weeks) installation of Centos 8. We have allocated 64 GB RAM and 20 cores to the Openshift CRC vm. There are two physical storage devices on the chassis:
- /dev/sda contains the Centos 8 stream installation,
- /dev/sdb is an unpartitioned drive assigned to the storage class for the block storage

For the products we support, we have discovered that NFS shares for backing storage will not work. The storage classes for these products absolutely require block IO devices.

We have installed the redhat local storage operator, and walked through the configuration document at https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.10/storage/persistent_storage/persistent-storage-local.html .

At step 2, "oc create -f .yaml", the yaml file is not available. However, we discovered that restarting the pods for the local-storage-operator and the diskmaker-manager attempted to perform the same operations.

The diskmaker-manager pod reports that it is attempting to create the PV, but failing because it can't find /dev/sdb.

Log: E0501 ... unable to add disk /dev/sdb to local disk pool: lstat /dev/sdb: no such file or directory.
When I open the terminal wndow for that pod I do indeed see that stat fails to find /dev/sdb.

How do we expose the bare metal OS' /dev/sdb to the CRC libvirt environment so it is available to the OpenShift operators to mount in the container?