SP Products Config Wizard fails for Socket Error Connection Refused - New Azure Setup (firewalls turned off)

Hi all,

I'm using this guide: "Step-by-Step: Build a FREE SharePoint 2013 Dev/Test Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services" by Keith Mayer 15 Jul 2013 6:30 AM over on TechNet.

And I'm currently in "Exercise 5: Configure SharePoint Server 2013 in a Windows Azure VM" steps 16/17.

When I try to create a new server farm following those instructions, the process fails.
The dialog window states:
"Configuring SharePoint Products"
"Performing configuration task 3 of 10" <- gets stuck here for a while and then I get the error below: 

The error from the PSCDiagnostics log is:

Trying to see if port 14387 is free on machine [my sp server].  Min port we will try is 1024, Max port we will try is 49151
05/14/2014 16:43:26  1  INF                                                    A SocketException was thrown with SocketError ConnectionRefused
05/14/2014 16:43:26  1  INF                                                    Connect has been refused for port 14387, so we will consider this a free port
05/14/2014 16:43:26  1  INF                                                    Have not found a free port yet.  Number of tries is 1.  Min port we will try is 1024, Max port we will try is 49151
05/14/2014 16:43:26  1  INF                                                    Adding port 14387 to the exclusion list so it is not chosen again during this run

[snip]

05/14/2014 16:48:22  9  ERR                                                            Task configdb has failed with an unknown exception 
05/14/2014 16:48:22  9  ERR                                                            Exception: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The semaphore timeout period has expired.) ---> System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception (0x80004005): The semaphore timeout period has expired

I've turned Windows firewall off on the SP Server, SQL Server and the AD Server (temporarily of course) and I've given user mydomain\sp_farm local and domain administrative rights as well as full rights within the SQL db.

I can ping from/to the SharePoint/SQL servers and get a response using the host name for each (the internal IP's 10.0.0.5/6 respond).  If I use the DNS server names, the pings fail.

However, after the SharePoint wizard fails, I can see on the SQL server that db SharePoint_Config (default name from SP wizard) is created.  So it looks like the SP wizard can connect because the db is being created.

Is this a timeout issue even though the log file shows "SocketError ConnectionRefused"?

Any ideas on how I can resolve this error?

Thanks.