As soon as the VMware offering becomes oriented for large deployments, new challenges hit its customers.
One of them surely is security maintainance, with a particular attention to patch management.
So here the latest technical note from the company about the esxupdate tool:
The process of applying software updates to an ESX Server system has become complex and time-consuming. Each new update introduces changes into the existing system, and it is crucial to apply only the required updates in order to stay current with security fixes and minimize the changes to your software environment while doing so.
Release 3.0 of the ESX Server system introduces a new software update model to address the challenges outlined above. This update model facilitates selective application of software updates specific to a particular environment. It also provides the flexibility of staying current with security and critical updates and allowing non-critical updates to be applied at a later time…
Read the whole paper at source.