When creating a file geodatabase on a VPSA volume mounted via SMB/CIFS, ArcGIS sometimes aborts the operation indicating that it was not able to create a lock file. This is related to a timing issue between the Windows 2008, 2012 SMB2 caching and filesystem accesses to the VPSA. There are no settings on the VPSA that can affect this behaviour.
The sequence of operations is firstly ArcGIS creates a lock file in the client-side cache, then immediately checks to see if the lock file has been created, bypassing the cache. Ten seconds later, the Windows client-side cache is then flushed to the VPSA and the lock file now exists on the VPSA. As the lock file did not exist on the VPSA at the time ArcGIS checked for the existence of it, the create file geodatabase operation is failed by ArcGIS.
As a short-term workaround, leave a Windows File Explorer window open in the same directory that the file geodatabase is being created in. This will continually invalidate the client-side cache for that directory, and ensure that the lock file is immediately flushed out to the VPSA.
For a more permanent workaround, please refer to the Microsoft Technote on how to disable the client-side caching at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff686200(v=ws.10).aspx .