Red Hat Virtualization, slow DB writes or network from virtual machine

I am running JBoss on both a physical machine, and a VM that runs within that same physical machine. The JBoss instance on physical machine is operating fast, but the JBoss on VM is slow (several orders of magniture). It appears that the following operations on the VM are slow: SVN checkout, big data streams (from database or external systems), hibernate calls. CPU and Memory % appears to be good on teh virtualization console.

I would therefore assume that the bottleneck is either 1) disk IO access, or 2) network. The disk that the VM uses resides on the same machine as the physical machine, and the VM is in the same network as the physical machien (ofcourse different IP).

Any ideas where I should begin to look at? Thanks