what is a safe way to stop the logreader? Applying cumulative updates and service packs on sql server 2016 -

The server is involved in transactional replication, being a publisher, 

The server is also a virtual machine.

I need to stop the logreader application in order to carry on with the updates.

what could be a safe way to get this done?
You can stop the log reader agent job in sql server agent. It is used by publications that are involved in t-rep. It basically copies the transactions marked for replication from the transaction log into the distribution database. Should be safe to stop it.