There are multiple ways available to patch a VMware Infrastructure. Two of the very common ones are through Update Manager or esxcli.
Update Manager enables centralized, automated patch and version management for VMware vSphere and offers support for VMware ESXi hosts, and virtual machines. Unfortunately it is available only on vCenter deployments and you cannot use it on standalone hosts.
When you need to update a standalone host you can follow the procedure described below.
In my case I wanted to patch an ESXi host from 6.7 Build 8941472 to 6.7 Build 9484548.
First you download the patch definitions from VMware site. In my case I needed to download the below bundle package:
Then, the package should be uploaded to the local or any available datastore so that host can access it. Also ssh should be enabled so that one can connect on the host with root account.
change directory and find the location of the file
Lastly execute the below command, and reboot the host
esxcli software vib update --depot filePath
The version available after the reboot, should be the new one
