Executive summary of question:

Is there a fast, efficient way to move a directory tree from one qtree to another? (Can a rename/mv simply relink across qtrees?)

Detail:

(We are new to NetApp, so this might be a FAQ: if so, just point me in the right direction.)

We soon need to move the home directories of a few thousand users from a couple of Sun/Solaris NFS/Samba fileservers onto a NetApp. On the old Sun fileservers, these users are subgrouped using one scheme (into about 100 subgroups); on the new NetApp they'll be redistributed into about five qtrees.

Ideally, we would simply pull them across the network (a long evening's work!) dumping them into one qtree on the NetApp. The second step would be to redistribute them into their new qtrees and, for us, conceptually straightforward because the homedirectory names can be pattern-matched into corresponding qtrees. In UNIX-speak, the equivalent of: mv qtree_tmp/<...>/dir_pattern_1 qtree_a mv qtree_tmp/<...>/dir_pattern_2 qtree_b (about five commands, one per qtree).

In UNIX-land, a "mv" within a volume is a fast operation, simply relinking from one parent directory into another; whereas an "mv" across volumes is (of necessity, of course) a much larger data-copying operation.

On the NetApp/WAFL is such a move across qtrees a simple relink or is it a data-copying operation? Is there a NetApp command to move/rename a directory-tree? If so, what?

Not having found a NetApp command, I experimented with an "mv" from a UNIX box which had the volume NFS-mounted. But this took a long time so, I presume, was doing a data-copy, rather than relink.

(Hope I explained that reasonably clearly!)