Welcome to the Community,
templates creation is the best and easy to deploy and manage....or you can create an appliance by exporting the vm in to ofv or ova format.
the windows activated vm you can make a template ... and if you dont select to regenerate SID in the customization manager answer file.. it wil keep the SID same... and you just deploy the template...but this will violate the EULA of microsoft.. for testing it is ok.. and moreover in production any way you need to remove the old SID..
you can use the KMS activation method in you organisation so that no need to do and track the manual activation...