Solaris

I've a sun server, 3 sun workstations and plan to do backup on certain directory in each workstations monthly.
As it's only require to mount as NFS on those workstations once a month. So I plan to configure such requirement using autofs.

What are the considerations need to take care in such configuration? Also, should I mount it permanently as NFS instead of AUTOFS?

Thanks.

For such requirement, I would go for autofs, unless you need a remote mount ALWAYS to be available

Autofs or even include making the NFS mount and unmount it into your backup scripts?

Is there any performance impact on autofs compare to nfs - permanently mounted?

Wasted CPU, memory and network resources, not an enormous amount but worth not wasting. The other benefit of automounting over permanent NFS mounts is that if the network dropped out causing the NFS mount to fail the next time you used the automounted directory it is likely to remount unlike a permanent NFS mount which could either hang the machine if a hard mount was made or just not work if a soft mount is made, writeable mounts should always be hard if you value what you are writing to them!