PHD Virtual Technologies announced the availability of Patch Downloader version 6.0, a new freeware solution to simplify patch downloading for various VMware ESX versions. Patch Downloader is the fifth free virtualization utility to be offered by PHD Virtual as part of its longstanding commitment to the virtualization community.
The purpose of Patch Downloader is to ease the pain of downloading patches for various ESX versions from the VMware site by automating it. If a user does not want to or cannot use Update Manager (doesn't have a license, no internet access from the ESX/VC hosts) they need to download the patches manually from the VMware website through a Java Download manager. It's easy to miss a patch, and painfully slow to find and select the ones you want. These downloaded patches go on an HTTP or FTP repository, or are copied direct to each host over SSH, and the esxupdate utility is used to patch the ESX host.
http://www.phdvirtual.com/download?task=view.download&cid=18