IOPS are always an issue in high performance DBs, whether physical or virtualized. You most definitely need to run your DB on multiple spindles (disks) and always, always, run the DB on a RAID 10 disk. Solarwinds published a document and, though it was published 2 years ago, the Best Practices for Managing the Orion Platform Database is still the go-to guide for building your DB.
From pg 2 of that guide:
At a minimum you should make sure that the LUN is on a RAID 10 array. One common
mistake is to place the storage on a Storage Area Network (SAN) that is RAID 5, RAID 6 configured or
has performance lower than a DAS subsystem. RAID 5 and Raid 6 configurations are not supported and
should never be used for Orion MS SQL storage.
Note the NEVER user RAID 5 or RAID 6 configurations for MS SQL storage.
Page 3 also lays out how the DB server should be configured with a separation of application, DB, log and temp files for a high performance solution.
This seems to be a theme this week, but read the guide. It really does an excellent job of detailing what needs to be done in a large DB environment. There will be those within your org that believe Solarwinds is simply throwing resources at the environment to protect bad code. I can assure you that this is not the case. Follow the recommendations and you will never have to ask yourself "Is it the DB?" (Of course, if you did you could always run SAM and use AppInsight for SQL to root out the problems! )