The inability to create users indicates a problem on that host.  I recommend using the following to manually run the commands on the host where the kafka role is not starting:   # /usr/sbin/groupadd -r kafka # /usr/sbin/useradd -r -m -g kafka -K UMASK=022 --home /var/lib/kafka --comment Kafka --shell /sbin/nologin kafka   Running them manually should highlight why they failed.   Regards,   Ben ... View more