I think there's a disconnect here. I'm an enthusiast running a free version of ESXi to house various VMs that are up 24x7 to provide services for my home network and locally hosted apps. The box I built started out as 4.1 back in 2011. I've been upgrading it since and am now running 6.0u2 on that same hardware. So a 60-day trial isn't going to work for me. My license is free, with no time-limit, but also no vCenter. Typically I don't upgrade until at least "Update 1" is released. I expected them to release an "Update 1" for my free license, but all they have is 6.5.0a. That's why I was asking if I needed to obtain an updated "free" license (different from trial) to access further 6.5 updates. Or if those updates were even forthcoming from vmware for their free license.
Along those same lines, William Lam's appliances are all nested, which isn't applicable to what I'm talking about here. He does provide excellent scripts and insight though. I've been using his local cron-based backup script to facilitate weekly backups of my VMs and ESXi configuration to my NAS for well over a year now.