I tried to start up mongod in a VirutalBox Ubuntu VM and got the following error:

mongod --dbpath data
...
WiredTiger error (22) [1515174663:595770][5709:0x7ff778b159c0],  \  
  connection: data/: directory-sync: fdatasync: Invalid argument

This happened because I was trying to store the data directory in a shared folder which is not supported as MongoDB requires a filesystem that supports fsync on directories.

To fix this simply use a non-shared folder in the VM:

mongod --dbpath ~/data
...
2018-01-05T17:56:18.555+0000 I NETWORK  [initandlisten] \  
waiting for connections on port 27017