How-To Resolve Terraform VM Creation Fails with Error "Infiniband Partition Already Exists"

Last Updated: Dec 25, 2025

Introduction

While creating virtual machines using Terraform, the apply command fails with the following error:

There was an error creating an Infiniband partition: bad request, check request parameters. a resource of this type already exists with this name in this project

Prerequisites

• Terraform
• Crusoe CLI

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Identify the name and UUID being used for the IB (Infiniband) partition in terraform and query for existing partitions with that name

   • Run the following command using Crusoe CLI to query using the name:

     # crusoe networking ib-partitions list | grep 'crusoe-test'
     crusoe-test              39ccd537-ffb5-410a-a11b-1a0dc193a6e2  63caf40c-d305-4230-969e-b054529595be

   • This will provide us the UUID of the partition which in the above case is 39ccd537-ffb5-410a-a11b-1a0dc193a6e2
2. Find if there are any existing virtual machines associated with this IB partition

   • To find the list of VMs already using this IB partition, run the following command using the CLI

     crusoe compute vms list | grep '39ccd537-ffb5-410a-a11b-1a0dc193a6e2'
     h100-test-vm                                  h100-80gb-sxm-ib.8x  eu-iceland1-a         STATE_RUNNING      39ccd537-ffb5-410a-a11b-1a0dc193a6e2  on-demand          216.x.x.x     172.x.x.x      --               

3. Modify terraform

   • If there are any existing virtual machines using the partition, then please proceed to use a different name for the IB partition in your terraform
      

     # create a unique IB partition to deploy VMs
     resource "crusoe_ib_partition" "my_test_partition" {
       name = "crusoe-test-2"
       ib_network_id = "63caf40c-d305-4230-969e-b054529595be"
       project_id = crusoe_project.my_project.id
     }

   • If there are no virtual machines using the existing IB partition, please proceed to delete the partition and re-run terraform apply.

     # crusoe networking ib-partitions delete 39ccd537-ffb5-410a-a11b-1a0dc193a6e 

Additional Resources

• https://github.com/crusoecloud/terraform-provider-crusoe/blob/main/examples/infiniband/main.tf