Veeam warns Software Appliance VMs can fail to boot on some AMD EPYC hosts

Veeam published an advisory on Wednesday warning that its Software Appliance virtual machines can fail to boot on hosts running certain AMD EPYC processors. The appliance is a pre-configured Linux-based VM for running Veeam Backup & Replication without a manual install.

The kernel used by the appliance runs a jitterentropy health test in FIPS mode during early boot. On some EPYC chips the test intermittently fails and the boot stops with a kernel panic. Veeam names AMD EPYC 7262, 7302 and 7F72 among the affected processors, and says the problem affects Software Appliance version 13.1 and later. Admins see a "Kernel panic - not syncing: jitterentropy: Initialization failed with host not compliant with requirements: 9" message.

Veeam's advice is to redeploy the appliance onto a host with a different processor. If that isn't possible, turn off automatic updates and install them by hand while watching the VM reboot. A guest OS restart won't recover a panicked VM; it has to be powered off and on. Once it boots, Veeam says no further errors are expected and backup operations aren't affected.

The advisory doesn't say how many hosts are hitting this. Anyone running the appliance on EPYC hardware should check which CPU model their host has before the next patch window, since a kernel update is exactly when the reboot happens.

The same day, Veeam said some of its products are affected by a critical Linux kernel vulnerability in IPv4 TCP networking, and that it has fixed it for some components.