I would expect the answer is hidden here
"Then I try top mount the volume via NFS and it seems to never work and I receive an error telling me essentially from VMware that the NFS server is not accessible."
Do you have everything properly configured on your destination cluster? starting from data interfaces, accesses etc.
Do you have your Vmware properly configured to access your destination cluster?
Usually destination cluster is located in absolutely different Data center
so does your prod VMware is even able to access the destination? (network, firewalls etc)