Image Compliance shows hardware compatibility issues

During an ESX server cluster update on image basis, I was confronted with a strange thing. The message says that there are hardware compatibility issues.

However, if you look at the details, you will quickly realise that there is nothing under the firmware version.

If you then scroll down a little, you will see the warning ‘Device is incompatible with the Driver/Firmware in clusters image‘.

So you do the basic task again before every update; check the VMware HCL. This is a HPE MR216i-a Raid Controller, which is supported for vSphere 8 U3:

So you check the firmware version on the OBB in this case HPE iLO and lo and behold, it has the supported version.

After a little research there is a VMware KB article on the whole thing which says: VMware is aware of this issue and will be fixed in the future releases.

Workaround:
In the event that the user observes the aforementioned symptoms and verifies that the firmware listed in the PCI device listings on the HCL UI is empty, the HCL warning can be disregarded. Should the remediation setting have been configured to block upgrades in the event of HCL issues, it is recommended that this setting be disabled to prevent any potential blockage of upgrades due to this HCL issue.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=89559

My customer did not want to ignore this problem and therefore he opened a Support ticket. Plus the KB article is 2 years old, so you would expect this problem to have been solved already. I will post an update as soon as my customer has feedback from VMware, so stay tuned. 😉