Veeam has issued a warning regarding boot failures affecting its Software Appliance virtual machines when running on hosts equipped with AMD EPYC processors, based on information published by Bleeping Computer.
The issue stems from a conflict between the Linux kernel used in Veeam Software Appliance version 13.1 and later and specific AMD EPYC hardware. During the early boot process, the system performs integrated health and cryptographic checks in Federal Information Processing Standards mode. Specifically, the jitterentropy health test intermittently fails on certain processors, such as the AMD EPYC 7262, 7302 and 7F72, triggering a kernel panic. Veeam reports that affected systems display a specific error message indicating the initialization failed due to non-compliant hardware requirements. To mitigate this, the company recommends that administrators redeploy the appliance to a host with a different processor. If redeployment is not feasible, users should disable automatic updates and perform manual updates while carefully monitoring the reboot process. If a kernel panic occurs, administrators must power off the virtual machine entirely rather than performing a standard guest operating system restart. Once the appliance boots successfully, normal operations for Veeam Backup and Replication should resume without further errors. This technical challenge highlights the complexities of maintaining security compliance across diverse hardware environments.
Source: Bleeping Computer
