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It took my deployment times down from 6-8 hours down to 15 minutes. I think what makes SmartDeploy superior to WDS for this is that SmartDeploy (the company) collects the drivers and packs them up for you, so the hardware you choose to put your golden image on is irrelevant. SmartDeploy images can also be sent out with WDS, although I haven't done that. You can also do it with ESXi, I just chose Workstation because at the time, I was new to VMware. I've done it over the network and via thumb drives and portable USB hard drives.Ī good use case is that you have a lot of dissimilar hardware, volume licensing, and not a lot of servers available- mostly smaller IT shops. It's great because it slipstreams the drivers in while putting Windows on there, too. It works just as you say- you create a "golden image" in VMware Workstation, then SmartDeploy packages is up, then you use SmartDeploy to put the image on your desktop or laptop. I have done this in the past using VMware Workstation and SmartDeploy.