Techniques are provided for persistent hole reservation. For example, hole reservation flags of operations targeting a first storage object of a first node are replicated into replication operations targeting a second storage object of a second node during a transition operation to transition the first storage object and the second storage object from an asynchronous replication state to a synchronous replication state. In another example, the second storage object is grown to a size of a replication punch hole operation that failed due to targeting a file block number greater than an end of size of the second storage object.