Found this problem on my Windows 7 PC where when I tried to start my Glassfish 3 server via Eclipse it seems to start alright, but Eclipse could not detect it has started.

On the server panel progress bar is stuck at “Starting glassfish..” message, and after few minutes it will say “Unable to start server on time”.. yet the server process is still running on the background.

Thanks to this StackOverflow answer by HAmark, this problem seem to be caused by Java unable to resolve the host name “localhost”.

This can be resolved by adding following entry on your C:WindowsSystem32driversetchosts file:

127.0.0.1 localhost