How to restart MC7354 in VMWare Hypervisor

Environment: ESXi hypervisor. Guest VM (probably Debian) runs application that interacts with the Sierra Cards.

We are able to passthrough the MC7354 cards to the Guest VM (USB passthrough) but we need a method to restart them if they become unresponsive.

Historically this has been done by interfacing the i2c bus on the server. VMWare Hypervisor cannot see the i2c bus. I am curious if anyone has any suggestions on how to restart these cards in a virtualized environment.

Thanks!

AlexW