LRM-00123: invalid character 0 found in the input file

When starting the Oracle database with Veritas Cluster Server, we got the following error:

LRM-00123: invalid character 0 found in the input file
ORA 1078 : Text: failure in processing initialization parameters

Oracle reads the PFILE/SPFILE information from our internal character set identified with PL/SQL and not the database created character set. While technically not hard-coded as US7ASCII, this is what the character set used is for SSTDLANG.

The problem is caused by ORACORE's enforcement of compiler character set when reading the INIT.ORA file. SSTDLANG is the limitation.

What we noticed is that by mistake we had given the name of the spfile as the pfile name. Veritas Oracle agent needs a plain text ASCII file like init.ora. So we create a file called vcs_init.ora which has a single line
spfile=path_to_spfile

Once we corrected this VCS was able to bring up the database without issues.