Introduction
When you try to start a virtual machine (VM) and encounter the error: "Could not start VM. Cannot create resource above reservation capacity." This happens because the VM is trying to start but is part of a billing reservation that is already at its maximum capacity.
A common scenario is when you have a VM attached to a reservation and you turn it off. If you then create a new VM and attach it to the same reservation, the new VM takes the available spot. Now, if you try to start the original, turned-off VM, the system will prevent it from starting because it would exceed the reservation's capacity.
For example, if your billing reservation is for a total of 320 GPUs and you already have 320 GPUs in use, you cannot start or create any new VMs attached to that reservation.
Prerequisite
- Crusoe Cloud account
- Access to the Crusoe Cloud UI or Crusoe CLI
Instructions
Crusoe CLI:
To fix this, you need to remove the VM from the billing reservation. You can do this by running the following command in your terminal:
crusoe compute vms update <VM_Name> \
--reservation-id ""Note: Replace <VM_Name> with the actual name of your virtual machine.
After running this command, the VM will no longer be tied to the reservation, and you should be able to start it without any issues.
Crusoe Cloud UI:
- Visit the Crusoe Cloud console
- Click the "Compute" tab in the left nav
- Click the "Instances" tab on the top bar
- Select the instance you want to remove the reservation from
- Click the "Remove from Reservation" button on the bottom right in the "Billing Type" "Reservation" tile
- The VM will be removed from the reservation. Any further usage will be billed on-demand
Terraform:
Similar to provisioning a VM as on-demand, passing in an empty string "" into the 'reservation_id' field associated with your "crusoe_compute_instance" resources in Terraform will update existing VMs and add them into a reservation.
Additional Resources: