Lets start simple, your example assumes that you generate the id yourself. In my experience a common API usage pattern would look more like

  try:
      vm_id = api.make_vm()
  except SomeError as e:
      log.error(e)
  else:
      res = api.do_thing_with_vm(vm_id)

and in your example, if we are generating ids ourselves, we still have to verify that we got the right VM. If your ids are provably unique, there is no reason to generate them, the API can take care of that, but if you want something like a named entity, you have a problem. What if the name is already taken? So your code would look more like

    new_id = generate_id()
    try:
        vm = api.get_vm(new_id)
    except VM_DoesNotExist:
        vm = api.make_vm(new_id)
    except SomeError as e:
        log.error(e)
    else:
        api.do_thing_with_vm(new_id)

because if the make_vm API simply returns a VM whether it was created or not, it is entirely possible that you are getting a VM that is busy doing something else for some other process.