3-4 minutes is a little long which might cause the yum timeout error. I haven't met the timeout issue in my 10Gb vlan.
You can try to resolve this issue like this:
login BDE server as user serengeti and run command:
sed -i 's|^yum_package name| yum_package name do retries 8; retry_delay 10; end|' /opt/serengeti/chef/cookbooks/mapr/recipes/prereqs.rb
knife cookbook upload -V
retry creation of the failed mapr cluster via 'cluster create --name <cluster_name> --resume'
this tells the chef-client to take 8 retries (with 10 seconds interval) when installing the mapr-core package.