Manually patching vSphere 5.0 free edition

As the free edition can't use update manager a quick and easy way to patch a single host is to download the latest patch from VMWare and upload to an accessible datastore then put the host into maintenance mode.

http://www.vmware.com/patchmgr/findPatch.portal

Then enable SSH on the host, login and run:

esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore/patchfile.zip

It'll take a while and you should get results that say it's all been sucessful and you need to reboot.