Veeam said in a knowledge base article that Software Appliance virtual machines, the Linux-based form of Veeam Backup & Replication, can fail to boot on AMD EPYC hosts. BleepingComputer reported on 6 November that the advisory came out on Wednesday. The failure is intermittent, can follow any reboot, and affects version 13.1 and later.
FIPS mode is a security setting used to meet corporate and government rules. In it, the kernel tests its randomness source, called jitterentropy, early in boot. Veeam says the test intermittently fails on certain EPYC chips, such as the 7262, 7302 and 7F72, and the kernel then stops with a panic. It gives no full list. Veeam says the behaviour originates in the Linux kernel, and no fix exists yet for the appliance's kernel version.
Veeam says that once the appliance boots, no further errors are expected and operation is not affected. The risk sits at reboots, and an unattended update reboots with nobody watching. The VM stays down until someone restarts it, and the panic may show only on a serial console or in the hypervisor event log. Veeam advises a different processor, or manual updates while watching the reboot. If the panic hits, power the VM off and on; a guest restart does not help. That turns an intermittent check failure into downtime for the backup system.