NFS Exports – Mounting Multiple Exports to the Same Client Directory

nfsstorage

I am running into an issue with NFS that I am not sure how to solve. I have spent a bit of time trying to find an answer but was not successful. I am ultimately trying to achieve the below setup without having to mount each sub-directory individually as these may change overtime dynamically and that route will not scale.

NFS Server1 exports /srv/files/ and
within that directory are these subdirectories which have the actual files needed on the client

/srv/files/0001/
/srv/files/0002/
/srv/files/0003/
/srv/files/0004/

NFS Server2 exports its own /srv/files
and within that directory is a similar structure though the subfolders will have a name unique in respect to NFS Server1 folders

/srv/files/0005/
/srv/files/0006/
/srv/files/0007/
/srv/files/0008/

NFS Client can mount both NFS server shares as read only but within the same directory:

/srv/nfs/0001
/srv/nfs/0002
/srv/nfs/0003
/srv/nfs/0004
/srv/nfs/0005
/srv/nfs/0006
/srv/nfs/0007
/srv/nfs/0008

Is this possible to do? Is NFS the right route? Again I will not need to write data to the NFS Servers, simply read.

Best Answer

This is not possible to do directly with NFS, but you can use unionfs or overlayfs to achieve that. As overlayfs is part of the standard kernel, I would suggest trying it first, something like:

$ mount srv1:/srv/files /srv1
$ mount srv2:/srv/files /srv2
$ mount -t overlay overlay -olowerdir=/srv1:/srv2 /srv/nfs
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