Just tinkering… I noticed that silabs provided the firmware 6.81.06 for the zm5304 which is the zwave chip on the vera so upgraded one of my test vera plus. It seems to work fine just like my usb dongle. Just had to pick the bridge controller version of the firmware.
Finding it interesting that my external UZB dongle SD3503 reports version 6.07 L:1 when the internal ZM5304 reports 6.7 L:7. And also that with the upgrade I lost the primary state of the controller.