Of course a desktop on a virtualization host isn't really recommended, but actually, managing highly or even high-available supports services as VMs on a set of fat workstations under the control of oVirt can be rather useful... And I prefer Cinnamon so much over the other desktops, it gets installed almost first after setup... Which turns out to be a mistake with oVirt. Anyhow, to make a long journey of hair-pulling root-cause searching short: Installing Cinnamon from EPEL has Otopi not find rpmUtils for one reason or another, even if I can see it on both sides, the engine and the target host. Remove Cinnamon, it works again and you can re-install Cinnamon after. I didn't test re-deploys, but I'd expect them to fail. Don't know if this should be a bug report, since Cinnamon very unfortunately doesn't seem official just yet. This is what you may expect to see in the engine logs: 2019-08-22 09:49:24,152+0200 DEBUG otopi.context context._executeMethod:145 method exception Traceback (most recent call last): File "/tmp/ovirt-BAJG2FYLMu/pythonlib/otopi/context.py", line 132, in _executeMethod method['method']() File "/tmp/ovirt-BAJG2FYLMu/otopi-plugins/ovirt-host-deploy/kdump/packages.py", line 216, in _customization self._kexec_tools_version_supported() File "/tmp/ovirt-BAJG2FYLMu/otopi-plugins/ovirt-host-deploy/kdump/packages.py", line 143, in _kexec_tools_version_supported from rpmUtils.miscutils import compareEVR ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'rpmUtils' 2019-08-22 09:49:24,152+0200 ERROR otopi.context context._executeMethod:154 Failed to execute stage 'Environment customization': No module named 'rpmUtils'