Has there been any traction on this? I'm also hitting up Intel on their end (Firmware Downgrade |Intel Communities) with the same issue to see if we can push this along. According to Intel, the certification validation lies with VMWare at this point. From what a VMWare Federal Escalation Engineer told me during a call for an unrelated service request, VMWare can either certify in-house OR request results from the hardware company to analyze for certification.
