What aer the advantages of building images in VMWare? I know that some people do it but I never understood why… just because you can??
The main advantage, and why I do it, is because you can take a snapshot BEFORE you run sysprep, so that if something is wrong with your unattended file, or you want to update the image and sysprep it again, you can as many times as you want by reverting back to that snapshot. If you don’t, you are limited to sysprepping 3 times per windows installation. It took me a few times to get my unattended.xml right, and being able to update once, push for all is big. My actual method is to build the image, with all the software, in VirtualBox, in audit mode. Then I sysprep /generalize /audit to sysprep it and have it go back into audit mode. Then I upload it to fog from the VM and download it to a physical machine in my office. I boot that one up (into audit mode) and install all the drivers I need, then sysprep again with the answer file “sysprep /oobe /generalize /unattend:unattended.xml” and upload, then multicast to the rest of the physical machines.