The firmware update the unlocked non-certified drives was in July 2010 (two and a half years ago).  None of the more recent updates seem to mention any changes/updates to that. I'm not sure why non-certified drives would be blocked for only one operation (expansion/reconfigure) - are you getting some kind of message indicating that is definitely the case?  Have you successfully done this with certified drives?  Last I heard, Dell had a firmware update in the works that would allow expansion to be done from the CTRL-R utility, where it historically could not be done from there.  Since 12.10.4 is from May 2012, I would assume (if the Dell guy who told me it was coming up was correct) that that update has not been released yet ... however, I could be wrong.  I don't have an H700 to test with, but you might try OMSA Live as an alternative to building a temporary Windows server to try the expansion from OMSA.   linux.dell.com/.../omsa-71-live
Have any VMWare users found a workaround for the following? PERC H700 and H800 drives (current firmware 12.10.4-0001 A10, r610 servers) allow the user (in bios during boot) to create new virtual disks using non-Dell drives, but you can't expand an existing virtual disk using non-Dell drives, when in bios.  The option is grayed out. OMSA for Windows gets around this.  Virtual Disk | Tasks |Reconfigure can do online capacity expansion, and accepts non-Dell drives for this. Problem is, OMSA for VMWare ESXi (v7.2 , the current version and also prior versions) does not have a virtual disk Tasks drop down.  You can't even make a hard drive blink.  (VMWare ESXi = v5.1) The only solution we can think of is to have two drive arrays attached to the computer, create a simple Windows Server with OMSA, boot into Windows, and expand the virtual disk using OMSA for Windows. I'd be interested in comments from others, including Dell people.  We've spent hours with Dell on the phone; this seems to be the only solution.  (Yes, Dell released a firmware version last year that stopped blocking non-Dell drives, but it only works for creating a new virtual disk, not expanding an existing one).   
RAID Reconfigure (Online Capacity Expansion) does not work for non-Dell drives 
in bios and is not available in OMSA for VMWare