IT Automation Appliance Imaging System and Method

A system, method, and computer program product for harvesting an image from a local disk of a managed endpoint to an image library is provided. In an embodiment of the method for harvesting an image, a managed endpoint is provided with a boot image that causes the endpoint to instantiate a RAM disk and execute the boot image from the RAM disk. The boot image is used to harvest an image by determining data on a local disk of the managed endpoint to be included in the image that are not already stored in the image library. In one embodiment, this is done by comparing hashes calculated on the data on the local disk to hashes of data in the image library. The data not already stored in the image library are then copied to the image library.