Host hung at power on will not complete boot process when connected to NetAPP storage

Products

• VMware vSphere ESX 8.x
• VMware vSphere ESX 7.x

Issue/Introduction

Host hung at power on will not complete boot process. Viewing console ALT-F12 vmkernel.log, all hosts in cluster have same errors --- Nfs41fileiosync:790: Synchronous io on obj

Cause

initiators (hosts) powered-off but NetApp server is never rebooted, resulting in many stale file handles

Resolution

With the possibility in mind that NFS server has stale file handles, power off all affected host and power on only one host to see if netapp can process request