Embodiments relate to enabling state manipulation of virtual machines (VMs) that have directly assigned hardware devices. A hypervisor manages execution of a VM with a guest operating system. The hypervisor directly assigns a physical (non-virtual) hardware device to the VM, such that the VM has exclusive use of the hardware device and the guest operating system uses the hardware without needing virtualization abstraction/mapping by the hypervisor. When the VM needs to be pauses, suspended, restored, or similarly manipulated, the hypervisor communicates with the VM to cause the guest operating system to perform whatever operations might be necessary by the hardware device. The hypervisor and VM/guest may communicate with a variety of mechanisms, such as a host driver communicating with a guest driver, a virtual bus service backed by a hardware bus of the computer, a virtual bus channel, or the like.