So think this is yet again my stupid NFS glitching. The file system got messed up and was read only, so it was not able to correctly write to the dhcp lease file. I used dhclient with verbose and there was an error (I'm working out of a console where I can't copy and paste so after a reboot I forget the name). But yeah that explains why it was glitching out.
I experimented with setting all my NFS shares as async to see if it does anything, been fighting this NFS issue for almost a decade it's a royal pain in the ass. I need to sit down one of these days and completely reengineer my network from scratch and figure out the best way to do it with minimum downtime. I want to look into ISCSI for the VMs, and SMB for regular file shares. Never really liked the way NFS does permissions anyway, so best to get off it completely.