Introduction to DRM
Welcome to the operator documentation for DRM (Disaster Recovery Manager), the site-level disaster-recovery orchestrator for Awanio Cockpit environments.
DRM lets you protect virtual machines by replicating them from a primary site to a recovery site, group those workloads into ordered recovery plans, and orchestrate the full recovery lifecycle — test failover, planned migration, emergency failover, reprotect, and failback — from a single console.
How the pieces fit together
- Vapor — the per-host virtualization engine. It performs the actual disk replication (source Vapor → target Vapor) and boots the recovered VM.
- Cockpit — the site controller. It manages Vapor hosts, exposes the per-VM Replication tab, and pairs with the peer site.
- DRM — the disaster-recovery orchestrator. It enrolls workloads, authors recovery plans, and drives failover across the paired sites. DRM delegates the underlying replication and boot work down to Cockpit and Vapor.
Two ways to operate DR
You can drive disaster recovery at two levels:
| Level | Where | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Per-VM | Cockpit → a VM's Replication tab | Configuring and operating a single workload directly |
| Site-level | DRM console (Workloads, Recovery Plans, Failover) | Protecting many workloads and recovering them as ordered groups |
Both operate on the same underlying replication. A workload you enroll in DRM appears with an active replication job in Cockpit, and a VM you configure in Cockpit's Replication tab can be added to a DRM recovery plan.
The disaster-recovery lifecycle
A typical two-site deployment follows this flow:
- Install the appliance — deploy the DRM OVA at each site and complete first-run setup. See Installing the DRM Appliance.
- Pair the sites — connect the primary and recovery Cockpits, and pair the DRM instances. See Pairing Two Sites.
- Protect workloads — enroll VMs for replication to the recovery site. See Protecting Workloads. Optionally set up IP Customization so recovered VMs come up on the DR subnet.
- Manage replication — trigger syncs, pause/resume, and tune the RPO over time. See Managing Replication.
- Author recovery plans — group workloads into ordered runbooks. See Recovery Plans.
- Rehearse and recover — run a non-disruptive test failover, and when needed, a planned or emergency failover. See Failover & Recovery.
- Reprotect and fail back — reverse replication and return the workload to its original site. See Reprotect & Failback.
- Monitor — watch replication health and recovery-point age. See Monitoring & Troubleshooting.
Running the whole process yourself?
Follow the End-to-End DR Walkthrough — a single hands-on runbook that chains every step above, with the expected result and how to verify it at each stage, from protecting a test VM through recovery, failback, and cleanup.
Key concepts
- Primary (protected) site — where the workload runs normally and replicates from.
- Recovery (DR) site — where the replica is stored and where the workload recovers to.
- Recovery point — a completed, physically stored copy of the workload's disks at the recovery site that a failover can boot from.
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective) — how often the workload is replicated. A smaller RPO means less potential data loss.
- Recovery plan — an ordered runbook that fails over a group of workloads in priority order.
- Test failover — boots a copy of the workload in an isolated network to rehearse recovery, without touching the running production VM.
- Reprotect — after a failover, reverses the replication direction so the recovery site now protects the workload.
- IP Customization — re-addresses a recovered VM's guest NICs at failover so it boots on the recovery-site subnet. See IP Customization.
New to DRM?
Start with Getting Started for the prerequisites and licensing, then run the End-to-End DR Walkthrough to exercise the full cycle hands-on.