Help forming a cluster

[Kevin_M]

also found this thread from you also

Change ES cluster_uuid

That would explain it It's best not to clone nodes, it can cause all sorts of strange issues. Yes, the elasticsearch-node unsafe-bootstrap tool will generate a new cluster UUID.

I did initially only have host#1 - then VM cloned it twice.

Deleting the data file for #1 fixed the issue - hoping i dont have any more issues down the road due to cloning