I too will try to help guide what is occurring here.
VMware has documented for many, many years that when it comes to any IO support on their OS, that you should follow the 3rd Parties Interop Guides and not VMware's: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2030818
IO is obviously network and storage - or looked at differently - the foundation of all communication/storage in what their product does and the primary two things that their product virtualizes (that may or may not be a test question for Vmware's exams).
VMware also doesn't do any testing of specific products prior to putting them in their HCL. They look at the specs of the HW product and say (paraphrasing) "It should work fine. Other Intel CPUs and Network Adapters like this work, so this one should too."
VMware also has nothing to lose by putting it in their HCL. If it doesn't work, they will just say it's a HW or driver issue and tell you to call Cisco. They will then quite conveniently point you to their KB article where they say that you are supposed to follow Cisco's HCL and then tell you are technically not supported as it is missing in our Interop.
Cisco puts all items in the interop through rigorous tested to confirm it functions as expected. If it fails, we either fix the underlying issue, determine that something isn't supported, or document in the footnotes of the HCL any exceptions. Only once this is documented do we add it to our HCL.
Cisco has little to no control over what another company chooses to put on their websites. We can ask that they take it down, but ultimately since they tell you to ignore what they say and do what we say, there is no compelling reason for them to comply.
To compound matters, Cisco cannot do testing until the new version of VMware becomes publicly available. So as soon as a new version comes to market for VMware, we put testing in motion. This takes time and we prioritize various products/configurations to get things covered as quickly as possible.
This is also why it takes time to create a Cisco Custom ISO for a given version. We can't even start until it is officially released and then we have to complete testing on some products to make sure that the drivers we are injecting into the ISO aren't affected by some underlying OS change in the new version. This simply takes time.
Cisco does't feel that we do a service to our customer's by blindly putting things on the HCL that haven't been tested. What if you upgraded thousands of nodes just to run into some issue on a product that was never tested? Again, we are putting your business first by doing thorough testing first.
VMware is a fantastic product, but this is common with every new release. We can't control what they do/do not change in their OS. We have to start from scratch with testing with every new release that comes out.
I hope this provides some insight into why this process takes time.
Thanks,
