The virtual machine you have set up in Vmware is running
drivers for the components of the virtual system - the multiple machines you wish to clone to - will be running physical hardware.
If the OS of your VM is Windows XP or later - you should not only have licenses and product keys for each new clone, you will also have to sysprep and generalize the image of your virtual OS, and specialize each new installation with
drivers and the product license on unattended installation, some of which will be updated automatically from Microsoft if an internet connection can be made.
If there are volume licenses for all the physical machines, then this is an ideal way to load the same Windows OS, applications, and branding across an organization. Most, if not all of the functionality to do this is available from Microsoft, in the form of the freely downloadable Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) and other Microsoft Windows Deployment Toolkits, but it is not a trivial task to master the techniques and scripts needed and to work out all the bugs. For just a few machines, it would be more economical to apply the images machine by machine. On its own, imagex.exe (part of the WAIK and MDT) is such a quick and simple tool, it is hardly worth using a third party system image tool to do the same job.
To be honest, I don't know what happens with VM of other OS flavours like Linux being transferred to physical systems - I suppose they are not installed across organizations to the extent Windows is.