Soft NFS mounts versus failover behavior

The default mount model for NFS is hard mounts and the replica failover behavior applies to hard mounts. Failover behavior is different if NFS soft mounts are used.

If the soft mount settings result in an RPC timeout prior to the established wait period for replica failover, then the timeout will result in an ETIMEDOUT error to the calling application. The use of soft mounts with replicated data is not recommended. If soft mounts are used and the nfso nfs_v4_fail_over_timeout value has been set, it is suggested that the retrans and timeo mount options be set to exceed the nfso setting. This will avoid ETIMEDOUT returns to applications for replicated data.