To add to this. I have uninstalled the HPC pack and the SQL server. did a re install and again. First node installs well, second node fails (and third and fourth - tried in serial mode). I had to run startnet again on the compute node machine to get it to work - strange !
EDIT:
I have tried this now on 5 different compute nodes. VMWARE is probably causing some network latency/loss ? which causes startnet (part of the bare metal install) fails on some network connection. whe restart it everything is okay. Maybe there needs to be more resilince in the build process ??