We recommend that you partition the disk before it is encrypted. When DataControl encrypts a disk it writes a private region at the start of the disk that contains a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier), the encryption keys, and the key versions for the disk. The keys require that the disk name remain the same or access will fail.
For example, let's say you have 2 non-partitioned disks, /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc, where /dev/sdc is encrypted by DataControl. If you remove /dev/sdb and reboot the VM, /dev/sdc will be renamed /dev/sdb and the keys stored on disk will become invalid. At that point access to the encrypted data will be lost.
If you partition disk /dev/sdc and then encrypt the partition, the keys are stored with the partition and not at the root level. That means if /dev/sdc becomes /dev/sdb it doesn't affect the keys and access to the disk is unaffected.