A little background first:
I have 7 1tb servers that house my DVD Collection in AVI Format. I can access these servers with NFS and Samba. Everything is set up as follows.

Names
Server 1 - Gateway.example.com
Server 2 - DVD01.example.com
Server 3 - DVD02.example.com
Server 4 - DVD03.example.com
Server 5 - DVD04.example.com
Server 6 - DVD05.example.com
Server 7 - DVD06.example.com
Server 8 - DVD07.example.com

Servers 2 - 8 have a DVD directory in /media that is exported and mounted by Server 1 in the /media directory using NFS.

So the /media directory looks like this
/media/dvd01
/media/dvd02
/media/dvd03
/media/dvd04
/media/dvd05
/media/dvd06
/media/dvd07

the /media directory is shared via SAMBA and NFS to allow the Windows and Linux machines to view the files.

What I would like to know is:

Is it possible to automaticly combine all the /media/dvdXX directories into one LARGE directory. kinda like LVM does with Hard Disks?

Is it possible to use LVM accross a network? If so what would the performace be like?

I would want this to display the files as if they were in a single directory as well as allow me to save the files to the virtual directory and have the files automaticly directed to the server with the open space (i.e dvd07)

Any information you have will be helpfull.
Joel

I'm pretty sure LVM doesn't work across a network. There are a number of parallel filesystem available such as PVFS and Lustre. Also, the next revision of the NFSv4 spec will include a way to do parallel NFS. However, all of these are fairly new and/or experimental, and thus not for the faint of heart. Plus I'm not sure how well it works with Windows (and I'm not sure if SAMBA implements Microsoft's Distributed File System stuff) If you're willing to spend a lot of money there is commercial solutions from folks like EMC. Normally I would say those things are beyond a home user's grasp, but given that you have 7 TB of home storage, I might be wrong .