About spanning volumes in OpenStorage disk pools

One of the capabilities a vendor may expose is the potential for images to span across volumes within a disk pool. NetBackup uses that capability to use the disk storage most effectively. NetBackup breaks up backup images into fragments and stores a fragment or fragments if a full image does not fit into the space available.

In NetBackup, the SpanImages attribute specifies that backup images can span across volumes in a disk pool. The SpanImages attribute applies to both storage servers and disk pools.

Volume spanning is not a trait that the OpenStorage vendor plug-in exposes. Therefore, by default NetBackup does not include the SpanImages attribute on storage servers and disk pools. You must set the SpanImages attribute on the storage server and the disk pools so that backup images span volumes.

See Setting OpenStorage storage server attributes.

See Setting OpenStorage disk pool attributes.

NetBackup does not support disk volume spanning for replication. NetBackup fails backup jobs to the disk pools that span volumes if the backup job is in a storage lifecycle policy that also contains a replication operation.