How To Configure Neverfail Continuity Engine To Protect An Application Without A Plugin

How To Configure Neverfail Continuity Engine To Protect An Application Without A Plugin

Summary

This article provides information on how to protect a custom application with Neverfail Continuity Engine.

Automatic protection for an application happens only if Neverfail has a plugin for that application. For commonly used applications like Microsoft SQL, Oracle, IIS, SharePoint, Exchange, vCenter, MySQL, Postgres SQL, MOVEit, Mitel, Atlassian, Veeam, etc. we do have plugins and our installer is intelligent enough to know to detect the application for which we have plugins and add those plugins during at the installation time.

Prerequisites

A working setup of Neverfail Engine. The application that will be protected has to be installed and configured before proceeding with the steps below.
When you want to use Neverfail Engine to protect an application for which we don’t have a plugin yet, then you need to configure Engine to protect that application’s services, replicate its data folders and also replicate configuration registry keys. Please see below how you address each of these 3 aspects.

Procedure

Adding app services to Engine protected set

This can be done from the Continuity Engine Management Service UI, in protected server's Services tab by clicking the Add service button (screenshot below).

For more details on Targets for Active and Passive server or how to set Recovery actions please see the following KB article: https://support.neverfail.com/portal/en/kb/articles/how-to-configure-application-services-in-neverfail-continuity-engine

In case the application is using EXE processes instead of services please let us know because we have a series of PowerShell scripts that do the same thing for the EXE process but those are not published and we provide them only on demand.


 Adding Application folders to Engine replication set

This can be done from the Data tab of the Management Service UI, by clicking the Add Inclusion button in the  Inclusion filters section (screenshot below).
 

 

Do not replicate application binaries i.e: *.exe, *.dll, *.ttf only application data has to be replicated by Neverfail Engine.

Adding registry keys to Engine replication set

This task cannot be performed from the  Advanced Management Client  but only with some online commands.
To do this you will need to open a command prompt under ‘Run As Administrator’ change the path to C:\Program Files\Neverfai\R2\Bin and run commands like the ones explained below.

You will have to be logged in with the user that was used when deploying Neverfail Engine.
Before that, you will need to identify the registry keys of the application by using Regedit.
Another way is to contact the application vendors and ask their support engineers to provide you with a list of registry, folders, and services for the points above if you don’t know them exactly.

Command syntax:
Nfcmd localhost AMFramework.doAddUserSponsoredInclusionRegistryFilter “<registry_inclusion_filter>”
 
Example of such a command for an application called Mitel:
Nfcmd localhost AMFramework.doAddUserSponsoredInclusionRegistryFilter “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WIW6432Node\Mitel\SMSG\**”

Applies to

Neverfail Continuity Engine 8.5 and later

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