Veeam warns of Software Appliance boot failures on AMD EPYC hosts

​Veeam warned customers about boot failures affecting Software Appliance virtual machines (VMs) on hosts with AMD EPYC processors. The company's Software Appliance VMs are pre-configured, Linux-based virtual machines that let admins run the Veeam Backup & Replication backup software suite on Linux devices without manually installing dependencies or configuring the software. To comply with corporate and government security frameworks, the underlying Linux kernel runs integrated health and cryptographic checks (such as jitterentropy health tests) in FIPS mode during early boot. However, as the company explained in a Wednesday advisory, these VMs will fail to boot and will crash with a kernel panic after failing an early-boot FIPS-mode jitterentropy check on some AMD EPYC processors. "A Veeam Software Appliance (Linux-based Veeam Backup & Replication) virtual machine running on a host with an AMD EPYC processor intermittently fails to boot after a reboot, including a reboot that follows an update that installs a new kernel," it said. "This issue occurs because the Linux kernel used by the Veeam Software Appliance runs a jitterentropy health test in FIPS mode during early boot, and the test intermittently fails on certain AMD EPYC processors, including AMD EPYC 7262, 7302, and 7F72. When the test fails, the kernel stops the boot process with a kernel panic." This known issue originates in the Linux kernel version used by the Veeam Software Appliance and affects Veeam Software Ap...