I struggled for a few days trying to get the hosted engine to deploy correctly. Some issues I encountered were minor documentation issues (and mostly just me misinterpreting something that was written). For example, when choosing an image source, I could choose cdrom, file, or something else, and I tried to choose file (thinking "image file", since I had an ISO to use for building the engine vm). Of course, it would bomb because it wanted me to give it a preconfigured engine file, NOT an ISO. I eventually figured I'd just get the appliance engine file, and went that route (and, in that case, that part worked!).

Then, it started to bomb consistently right after starting the network configuration step. It turned out that the motherboards I had (Supermicro) did not have UUIDs encoded on them--they were blank. As a result, the vdi step was failing to gather the information it needed, but it kept dying with error messages that were pretty difficult to decipher. I eventually stumbled across the UUID as "None" in the return block, which finally led me to dmidecode to verify that the UUID was blank. Then I had to figure out how to actually get the UUID set. I found an AMI utility that helped me get them set to something, though it didn't actually set them correctly. In the meantime, Supermicro helpfully replied to my support request with a link to a utility they provide to do the same thing (though I wish that had been documented somewhere on their site!). 

UUIDs finally set, I started to work through a few other issues, and finally came to the point where it was gathering some network information before going to do the next step, and now it kept dying saying that the hostname was not unique, then it listed every IP address configured on the system (and there were several). DNS was working, and pointed to the correct IP address for the hostname. The hostname was set correctly. I could not get this to resolve. I got frustrated and posted on twitter. A few nice people here saw it and recommended that I join the mailing list. That's why I'm here now. 

Before I posted here, though, I wanted to try again when I was fresh and not having dealt with all of the previous problems. My first attempt was to drop the hostname into /etc/hosts, thinking maybe the install wasn't consulting DNS or was confused because there were several IP addresses. 

BINGO. This fixed the "not unique" address problem! 

... now I just had to go and clean up a botched installation because it also couldn't find the hostname for the hosted engine (also in DNS, but I just put it in /etc/hosts to hopefully get around whatever issue that is). 

So.. long story short.. Thanks for good software and for being so willing to support it, and thanks for putting up with reading this whole thing. Now, if someone can explain why DNS isn't being consulted for host names correctly, that would be super... :) 

jonathan

--