@Michael Rife, I don't know if you solved this, but I just had the issue and solved it for myself. Reading the source code Zeppelin appears to be trying to connect to itself at that point, and since it hasn't started correctly it isn't able to start. I connected to the VM and confirm that nothing is listening on the Zeppelin port, so it's reasonable that it would fail to connect. I look at the log for Zeppeloin and noticed multiple stack traces for an exception javax.servlet.ServletException: Resource class org.apache.zeppelin.server.ZeppelinServer can not be instantiated due to InvocationTargetException and went off Googling. It appears that this can be caused by an empty notebook file. So I looked for one and found it [root@sandbox notebook]# find . -ls | more 2367730 4 drwxr-xr-x 17 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Apr 27 17:29 . 2371541 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2ANTDG878 2371542 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 13609 Feb 26 20:47 ./2ANTDG878/note.json 2371561 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2BEQE47HR 2371562 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 3546 Feb 26 20:47 ./2BEQE47HR/note.json 2371564 4 -rwxr-xr-x 1 zeppelin hadoop 326 Feb 26 20:47 ./update_all_notebooks.sh 2371557 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2BB5CUPUW 2371558 1048 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 1071678 Feb 26 20:47 ./2BB5CUPUW/note.json 2371555 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2BAVUZ7NA 2371556 100 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 102307 Feb 26 20:47 ./2BAVUZ7NA/note.json 2371539 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2ANT56EHN 2371540 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 14906 Feb 26 20:47 ./2ANT56EHN/note.json 2371545 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2AS5TY6AQ 2371546 52 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 52672 Feb 26 20:47 ./2AS5TY6AQ/note.json 2371537 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2A94M5J1Z 2371538 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 13057 Feb 26 20:47 ./2A94M5J1Z/note.json 2371543 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2APFTN3NY 2371544 1292 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 1319772 Feb 26 20:47 ./2APFTN3NY/note.json 2359541 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Apr 27 18:12 ./2BM4EHNF7 2359543 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 0 Apr 27 18:12 ./2BM4EHNF7/note.json 2359427 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Apr 27 17:20 ./2BKDJ7EJQ 2359540 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 16137 Apr 27 17:20 ./2BKDJ7EJQ/note.json 2371535 540 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 549775 Mar 14 15:07 ./notebooks.zip 2371549 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2B48PF7SN 2371550 96 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 96143 Feb 26 20:47 ./2B48PF7SN/note.json 2371559 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2BBBW75VS 2371560 1188 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 1213695 Feb 26 20:47 ./2BBBW75VS/note.json 2371553 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2B522V3X8 2371554 268 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 274336 Feb 26 20:47 ./2B522V3X8/note.json 2371563 8 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 6433 Feb 26 20:47 ./README.md 2371547 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2B21B3AYC 2371548 76 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 77501 Feb 26 20:47 ./2B21B3AYC/note.json 2371551 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 zeppelin hadoop 4096 Feb 26 20:47 ./2B4TWGC8M 2371552 48 -rw-r--r-- 1 zeppelin hadoop 46910 Feb 26 20:47 ./2B4TWGC8M/note.json I moved the directory with the offending file (./2BM4EHNF7) off to /tmp and it worked. A quick way to do this is to SSH into the sandbox and use a one liner to move the files out: $ ssh root@127.0.0.1 -p 2222 root@127.0.0.1's password: Last login: Wed Apr 27 18:52:40 2016 from 10.0.2.2 [root@sandbox ~]# BAD_FILE=`find /usr/hdp/current/zeppelin-server/lib/notebook -name "*.json" -size 0` ; mv `dirname $BAD_FILE` /tmp/ ... View more