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 Appliance version 13.1 and later.
According to Veeam, users are seeing "Kernel panic - not syncing: jitterentropy: Initialization failed with host not compliant with requirements: 9" kernel panic errors on impacted systems.
Mitigation available
To mitigate this issue, Veeam told IT administrators to redeploy the appliance to a Linux host with a different processor.
If the appliance cannot be redeployed on a system with an unaffected processor, IT admins are advised to disable automatic updates for the appliance and install updates manually (while monitoring the VM as it reboots).
"If the kernel panic occurs, power off the virtual machine and power it on again. A restart of the guest operating system does not recover the virtual machine," Veeam added. "After the appliance has booted successfully, no further errors are expected, and the operation of Veeam Backup & Replication is not affected."
Earlier today, Veeam also said that some of its products are affected by a critical Linux kernel vulnerability (CVE-2026-98432) in the IPv4 TCP networking code that allows remote unauthenticated attackers to execute commands as root on servers running Multipath TCP (MPTCP) listeners.
The company has fixed the CVE-2026-98432 flaw for some impacted Veeam components and is now pushing the patched kernel to affected systems either as a private fix or through the Veeam Updater.
Veeam's products are used by more than 550,000 customers, including 74% of Global 2,000 firms and 82% of Fortune 500 companies.
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