As stated in my previous posts, for my lab and internal network infrastructure, I'm using mostly Linux bases servers. They're pretty reliable, low maintenance, low footprint, and they do the job without a GUI. Of course when I'm spinning up a new server every day or two for testing purposes, configuration can get a bit repetitive. To make my life easier, I've decided to create a "golden image" of my currently preferred server distro, Ubuntu Server 12.04 64 bit.
To create this base server, I've thrown together a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation. Standard version 9 virtual machine, 1 core, 512MB of RAM, and a 20GB hard drive. The next snapshot will include the removal of non essentials like sound card, USB, etc. Once the machine is created, Ubuntu Server 12.04.3 64 bit is installed, and configured with a default username and password, along with the SSH service. I don't set a static IP at this point, as I've created a script to take care of that and placed it in the home directory, along with a script to check memory usage.
Once the base install was complete, I installed VMWare tools and Webmin, and called it a day. Once it's shut down, I created a snapshot in Workstation and made notes as to what was done to the virtual machine, which basically prepped it for upload or cloning. To actually upload to my ESXi box, I just use the VMWare Standalone Converter, and make sure to adjust RAM amounts depending on the tasks the VM will be handling, and also set the disk to thin provisioned depending on what disk it will be sitting on.
This whole process takes a lot of the work out of creating/deploying scenarios and new labs, which is great. This, along with my golden image of Server 2012 R2, and I can have labs up within half an hour. Minus the configuration of course.