[Gluster-users] Start a new volume with pre-existing directories

[Daniel Zander]

Dear all,

at our institute, we currently have 6 file servers, each one of them 
individually mounted via NFS on ~ 20 clients. The structure on the 
servers and the clients is the following:

/storage/1/<user_directories> (NFS export from FS1)
/storage/2/<user_directories> (NFS export from FS2)
etc ...

Recently, we decided that we would like to migrate this to glusterFS, so 
that we can have one big storage directory on the clients. Let's call it

/gluster/<user_directories>

I tried to set up a gluster volume with two empty fileservers and it 
worked without any problems. I could easily mount it on a client and use 
it (using the native glusterFS mount).

If we now want to migrate the entire institute, it would be very 
convenient, if existing folders could be easily included into a new 
volume. I tried to do this, but I did not succeed.

Here's a short description of what I tried:

Existing folders:
on fs7: /storage/7/user_1,user_2
on fs8: /storage/8/user_3,user_4

gluster volume create transport tcp fs7:/storage/7, fs8:/storage/8

I hoped to see on the client:
/gluster/user_1
/gluster/user_2
/gluster/user_3
/gluster/user_4

The creation was successful, the volume could be started and mounted. On 
the client, however, I could only find (via "ls /gluster") the 
directories user_1 and user_2. But when I tried  "cd /gluster/user_3", 
it succeeded! Now "ls /gluster" showed me user_1, user_2 and user_3. 
Unfortunately, user_3's subdirectories and files were still invisible, 
but with the above mentioned trick, I could make them visible.

This is however not an option, as there are too much users and too 
complicated file structures to do this manually. It anyhow seems like 
Voodoo to me.

Is it possible to include all of the existing directories in the new 
glusterFS volume? If yes: how?

Thank you in advance for your efforts,
Regards,
Daniel