Veeam has warned customers that Software Appliance virtual machines can fail to boot on hosts with certain AMD EPYC processors. This is an availability problem, not a security vulnerability.
Affected Systems
- Product: Veeam Software Appliance 13.1 and later
- Hardware: hosts with some AMD EPYC CPUs. The EPYC 7262, 7302 and 7F72 are named.
Symptoms
VMs intermittently fail to boot, including after the reboot that follows a kernel update. The console shows:
Kernel panic - not syncing: jitterentropy: Initialization failed with host not compliant with requirements: 9
Cause
In FIPS mode, the Linux kernel runs a jitterentropy health test during early boot. On the affected processors the test fails intermittently, and the kernel halts. The issue originates in the kernel version used by the appliance.
Workarounds
- Redeploy the appliance on a Linux host with a different processor.
- If that is not possible, disable automatic updates and install updates manually while watching the VM through the reboot.
- If a panic occurs, power off the VM and power it on again. A guest OS restart does not recover it.
Veeam has not described a permanent fix. It says that once the appliance boots, no further errors are expected and Backup & Replication operation is not affected.
Why It Matters
Backup infrastructure that cannot boot after an update is a recovery risk. If you run the appliance on EPYC hosts, turn off automatic updates, schedule reboots in a maintenance window, and confirm you can reach the console to power-cycle the VM.