restarting libvirtd with sr-iov

We're running libvirt under Debian 12, package version 9.0.0-4. Earlier today I made a configuration change and restarted libvirtd. I've done this for years and never had a problem, after restarting it shows all the active storage pools, networks, and virtual machines and worked fine. However, I guess this is the first time I've done it on a system with an sr-iov network pool. After restarting, I was unable to initialize any virtual machines, as it would try to reallocate vf's that were in use by existing machines already running, resulting in an error from qemu. I spent a fair amount of time trying to recover from this, ideally with some way to make libvirt scan existing vm's and update the sr-iov pool in use status, or even some manual way to tell it which ones were in use. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything and ended up having to shut down all the vm's and then restart them to fix it. Where is the sr-iov pool state stored? Is it just in an in-memory data structure that goes away when libvirt restarts? libvirt doesn't inventory existing vm's and figure out what's in use at startup if that's the case? Is there any way to recover from this situation short of the nuclear "shut down and restart everything" option? Thanks much...