I wanted to download the update files from VMware's patch start to my server. I also found out that the link provided is short lived and only lasts for a short time period.

I tried with wget and all I got was the following problems:

$ wget -d -S --user-agent='User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0' https://download2.vmware.com/patch/software/VUM/OFFLINE/release-442-20140820-928303/ESXi500-201408001.zip?AuthKey=1413722765_e918e5834e1f25050c33ae077a0942e5&HashKey=a0d7eaf81eb41d7f6515306b0ca20e5c 
Setting --server-response (serverresponse) to 1
Setting --user-agent (useragent) to User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0
DEBUG output created by Wget 1.15 on linux-gnu.
URI encoding = ‘UTF-8’ 
--2014-10-19 13:48:25--  https://download2.vmware.com/patch/software/VUM/OFFLINE/release-442-20140820-928303/ESXi500-201408001.zip?AuthKey=1413722765_e918e5834e1f25050c33ae077a0942e5
Resolving download2.vmware.com (download2.vmware.com)... 23.3.211.44
Caching download2.vmware.com => 23.3.211.44
Connecting to download2.vmware.com (download2.vmware.com)|23.3.211.44|:443... connected.
Created socket 3.
Releasing 0x00000000019892d0 (new refcount 1).
Initiating SSL handshake.
Handshake successful; connected socket 3 to SSL handle 0x0000000001989610
certificate:
  subject: /C=US/ST=CALIFORNIA/L=Palo Alto/O=VMware/OU=IT Operations/CN=*.vmware.com
  issuer:  /O=Cybertrust Inc/CN=Cybertrust Public SureServer SV CA
X509 certificate successfully verified and matches host download2.vmware.com 
---request begin---
GET /patch/software/VUM/OFFLINE/release-442-20140820-928303/ESXi500-201408001.zip?AuthKey=1413722765_e918e5834e1f25050c33ae077a0942e5 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0
Accept: */*
Host: download2.vmware.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
---request end--- 
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...  
---response begin---
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
[rest removed]
What is interesting to note, with the above, is that in the GET request only one of the parameters is passed and it seems that this is causing the 403 response.

The answer was to make use of curl, which worked:
curl -o ESXi500-201408001.zip --ssl --get --data 'AuthKey=1413722765_e918e5834e1f25050c33ae077a0942e5&HashKey=a0d7eaf81eb41d7f6515306b0ca20e5c' https://download2.vmware.com/patch/software/VUM/OFFLINE/release-442-20140820-928303/ESXi500-201408001.zip