Hi James,
Apologies for the delay, I have been off work for the past two weeks.
This is speculation, but it is most likely that Dell EMC and VMware are the same company that has led them to offer support. It is of course not without irony however, as this would mean that whilst the potential problems of offering support in lieu of the OS vendor are in their view navigable, creating the documentation set in the first place is not.
It is indeed the storage vendor's prerogative to offer support where the OS vendor does not, but firstly let's be clear: VMWare do not support this. The absence of a statement to the contrary does not equate to a support statement; if a configuration is not explicitly in the HCL then it is not supported. I should also mention, that the vast majority of our customers are not satisfied with support only being listed on our support streams within SPOCK, rather they insist on seeing a likewise statement within the OS vendor's streams, in this case the HCL.
As an example: for fibre Channel, VMware provide us with a bench test for which we return the logs; within these tests are options for both direct-connect and switched environments. If the logs contain what they want to see, then a given configuration will be added to the VMware HCL and thus considered supported. As close to as in unison as is possible, we then update our support streams as the de facto support statement as the storage vendor. Note then, that the direct connection 'options' for these tests are absent for iSCSI. Without a set of VMware specified tests, the storage vendor would have to take the risk of offering support.
Now to the point of why HPE will not make this leap. Firstly, I should mention that these are discussions that in various forms I have had and continue to have within engineering, and it's not an unknown gap. Nevertheless the outcome is always the same, which is that we will not support something which the OS vendor themselves do not.
Q: Do customers do it anyway? A: Yes, some do. It is usually those who have either not sought the correct input from HPE or our partners, or who have received incorrect information; for example the incorrectly accepted answer to this thread by 'DigitallyAccurateInc'
Q: Will it cause issues during a support call? A: It depends. If the problem is in any way related to storage, then whether the configuration is supported should always come into question. I would think that some support cases ignore this, and others do not. It certainly creates an element of risk, which is a bad word in business.
I hear you regarding the competitive disadvantage, but I would say it not significant given iSCSI being the least used protocol in direct connect environments; but I fully agree that this is less than ideal. In fact, I would very much like to see this as supported, but I can only suggest that customers lobby VMware to make the necessary changes so that we can offer official support. Until then, we will not change it.
I encourage everyone to speak to the storage vendor when in doubt. Forums are not the best places to get answers to this kind of thing, here for example the wrong answer came before the right. That said, I do see the value in a discussion as to 'why not' etc., as that gives in this case HPE, a chance to explain to you our position. Of course it's imperative that we're in on the discussion, so perhaps the real problem is that this thread is on the VMware site and not the HPE...not to say I haven't seen wrong answers there too from time to time :smileywink:
Kind regards,
Ben