How to upgrade to the latest VSAN Beta Refresh of RVC on Windows?

A variety of new updates can be found in the latest VSAN Beta Refresh including a new RVC (Ruby vSphere Console) namespace called SPBM (Storage Policy Based Management) that allows users manage and configure VM Storage Policies. However, this update is currently only available for the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) and there is no update package for the Windows based vCenter Server (I hear this is being looked into).

UPDATE 12/04/13 - I just received an update from Cormac that we have just released a VSAN Beta Refresh for vCenter Server for Windows which you can download here.

For those of you who are running vCenter Server on Windows for the VSAN Beta and wish to try out the latest release of RVC which includes additional fixes as well as the new SPBM namespace can do so by just updating to the latest RVC package.

Step 1 - Download the rvc_1.3.3-1_x86_64.rpm package from the VSAN Beta website and upload that to your Windows vCenter Server.

Step 2 - Download and install 7zip on the Windows vCenter Server or another Windows server which can be used to extract the contents of the RPM package.

Step 3 - Right click on the RPM package and select the "Extract to rvc_1.3.3-1_x86_64/" option which should create a new folder that contains a new file called rvc_1.3.3-1_x86_64.cpio.

Step 4 - Right click on the CPIO package and select the "Extract to rvc_1.3.3-1_x86_64/" option which will create another folder containing the actual RVC bits.

Step 5 - Copy the contents from inside of opt\vmware\rvc to the following path on your vCenter Server C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server\support\rvc Once you have replaced the updated RVC bits, you can now change into that directory and launch RVC by just typing "rvc" and hitting enter. To confirm that RVC has been successfully updated, you can then type "spbm." and hit tab and you should see eight new SPBM commands.

To learn more about RVC for Windows, I would highly recommend you check out Eric Bussink's blog article here.