HP G6 VMware ESX 6.5 upgrades to v6.7 an 7.0 and notes

 Decided to finally upgrade my home lab HP G6 ML350 ESXi servers to something newer than v6.5.  Usually an SD card is chosen to as the location for ESXi OS installations.  This allows certain flexibility that would otherwise be harder on hard drive based installs. Namely for backing up, testing, and running multiple versions to name a few. The SD card was removed and an image of it was made, then that image was written out to a different SD card using software by the name of OSFClone.  Now a second copy of the ESXi OS exists so experiments and testing can be done; and if it implodes, oh well!  Just swap back to the original SD card.

One method to patch VMware ESXi  servers is to do it from the Command line, and download the source from VMware's software repository.  In some cases it is quicker than using Update Manager.  These steps are to SSH into a server, enable HTTP & HTTPS on the firewall, download and install the update, reboot (assuming the server has no running VM's).  I use this site for reference:

https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ESXi-6.5.0.html

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.7.0-20201004001-standard \
-d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

Turns out this method also works really well for doing version upgrades!  I ran the above lines to do the v6.5 to v6.7 upgrade.
The first attempt greeted me with dependency warnings.  The generic version of ESX is installed, then the HP Offline bundle and HP Smart Storage Adapter VIBs were installed, so those needed to be removed.  
esxcli software vib list (this will get the list the names of all VIBs installed) 
esxcli software vib remove --vibname name of VIB
After that the upgrade went smooth and everything works.  Excellent!  Can we go newer?  
I swapped SD card back to the original, so essentially physically reverting back at v6.5u3.  Speaking of which.  VCenter v7.0 does not seem to care that one server was running v6.5, then v6.7, then back to v6.5.  There seems to be no issues concerning random version changes on the ESXi hosts.
Putty back into the host and ran:
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-7.0U1c-17325551-standard \
-d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml
Success!!  ESXi 7.0 running on a HP Proliant ML350 G6