I had a modest 100 GB free on my laptop, with one properly configured Windows virtual machine already occupying more than 20 GB. Creating five fresh PCs the usual way would have meant sitting through Windows Setup five times, updating them, personalizing them, and wasting precious hard drive space.
Instead, I built one golden image in VMware Workstation and created five linked clones that share its virtual disk. Each clone can be spun up in seconds and only occupies 8.0 MB of hard disk space when initially deployed.
After configuring and customizing each one, the complete setup, including the original VM, only used 32 GB. The cloning was the easy part, but making the parent VM was anything but.
