Technique for deploying operating systems in a virtualized environment

A method of creating and capturing a guest disk image comprising:

• creating, by a computer, a plurality of virtual disks from a single storage array, wherein the virtual disks include at least one virtualization software disk and at least one guest disk, and wherein the at least one guest disk is minimally sized to accommodate operating system and data files and minimize unused space;
• installing, by a computer, virtualization software onto the at least one virtualization software disk, wherein the virtualization software bundles a virtualization software console and a restore environment;
• partitioning, by a computer running the virtualization software, the guest disk into at least an operating system (OS) partition and a data partition;
• installing, by a computer running the virtualization software, a guest operating system that bundles virtualization drivers onto the OS partition of the guest disk;
• booting, by a computer running the virtualization software, the guest operating system through the virtualization software console;
• configuring, by a computer, settings of the guest operating system depending on applications or services installed on the guest disk;
• booting, by a computer running the virtualization software, the restore environment from the virtualization software console;
• capturing, by a computer, a guest disk file system of the OS partition into a first disk image file and a guest disk file system of the data partition into a second image file;
• and
• saving, by a computer, the first and second disk image files to the at least one virtualization software disk.