Unable to send Start: Failed to create VM. The computer "XXXXX-XXXXX-XX" could not be resolved

On attempting to install Docker 1.12.0-stable (build: 5968) on Windows 10 Pro, it failed to start with the error:
Unable to send Start: Failed to create VM. The computer “XXXXX-XXXXX-XX” could not be resolved.

See Information section for solution.

Expected behavior

Docker would create the VM “MobyLinuxVM” inside Hyper-V and then start.

Actual behavior

  • Hyper-V was enabled (previously disabled)
  • New service created inside Hyper-V called “XXXXX-XXXXX-XX” (15 characters)
  • The “MobyLinuxVM” VM was NOT created (I was able to manually create it myself)
  • The start request failed as the VM had not been created, resulting in the error message.

Information

If you rename the Windows10 machine to be no longer than 15 characters (my machine had 17) the problem goes away. I hope this helps someone else with the same problem.

Thanks for reporting this. Just to confirm, you got this error from Docker for Windows because you already had a different Hyper-V VM with a name longer than 15 characters?

No, my host Windows 10 machine had a name longer than 15 characters. Docker
created a server within Hyper-V with a name that was truncated to 15
characters. As a result, I was able to ping the name in the error message
which was strange because the error indicated it could not resolve it.

Thanks for clarifying, I’ve created an issue. We should probably error or warn when installing and starting Docker for Windows.