We recently conducted a survey of our customers to understand how they are using various image creation and deployment tools available on the market. Our sample group contained a lot of long-time customers and included active deployments.
I have observed a trend over the past couple years of successfully leveraging MDT to build reference images (aka gold master, source) and then handing that image off to Deployment Solution 6.9 or 7.x for distribution.
Whether you choose DS 6.9 or DS 7.x comes down to your licensing investment, IT maturity and frame of reference on policy-based systems management tools.
Without further ado, here’s the data (via Infogr.am)!