Verifying NFS Hard or Soft Mounting on ESXi Hosts

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Verify that the NFS are hard mounted to avoid possibilities of corruption. 

Environment

ESXi 7.x and above

Cause

Clarification on NFS mounting on ESXi hosts.

 

Resolution

VMware ESXi prefers soft mounts for NFS datastores.
If a strict hard mount is required then it needs to be configured on the NFS server rather than on the ESXi host.

Additional Information

vSphere typically soft mounts NFS datastores by default. This means that if the NFS server becomes unresponsive or there is a network issue, the vSphere host will try to reconnect to the NFS server, but it won't cause the host to hang indefinitely.

In contrast, a hard mount would cause the NFS client (in this case, the vSphere host) to wait indefinitely for the server to respond, which could lead to long delays in certain failure scenarios.