The RVC stands for Ruby vSphere Console; it is a ruby based command line control which can be used for managing vCenter instances. This feature particularly comes in handy in situations where you would want to analyze and troubleshoot vSAN health/maintenance issues.
Let's dive into it straight away. In order to access the RVC console, you have to open a SSH session with the target vcenter server and login using vcenter root account. Once logged in, follow the steps as shown in the screenshot below:
Once you navigate to the cluster level, type in vsan. and hit "TAB". You would see all the vSAN commands available:
I will be discussing few of the available commands.
1- vsan.disk_stats .
This command gives us information on % usage and number of components present in each of disks (Cache and capacity) participating in the vsan. This command comes in handy when you would want to ensure data has been completely evacuated from a disk/disk group before proceeding with maintenance activities:
2- vsan.obj_status_report .
This command gives information about orphaned components in the vsan cluster (also called inaccessible components). This command allows us to view components that are present in vsan metadata information, but no longer actually present on the disks:
3- vsan.resync_dashboard .
This command shows the status of resynching objects in the vsan cluster, note: this view is also available in the vcenter GUI
4- vsan.health.cluster_status .
This command shows a summary of the vsan health status. This is exactly same as the vsan health test (Skyline health in ESXi 7 and above) available in the vcenter GUI.
I have only shown example of few of the commands that I have found handy so far. There are several other commands available, I will update this post as and when I use the other commands available.