Several users in the community have reported running into a memory error issue when attempting to upgrade their standalone ESXi hosts using this ESXCLI trick, which has been possible since ESXi 5.1 back in 2012.
[MemoryError]
Please refer to the log file for more details.
Initially, I was not able to reproduce in my lab environment at work, which was running ESXi 8.0 Update 2, but I still got an error message but it was different:
Got no data from process.
Command "LANG=en_US.UTF-8 /usr/lib/vmware/esxcli-software sources.profile.list -d "https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml" "
Π΅xited with error code: 1
After checking my homelab environment which was also running ESXi 8.0 Update 2, I did see the same MemoryError message as reported by the community when using ESXCLI to list the available ESXi Image Profiles from VMware's online patch repository.