timeout setting for bringing nic up?

Some of the dev servers we use are VM guests (RHEL 5.9) reside on Oracle VM 3.27 servers. Sometimes we ‘Start’ those VMs, when secondary network devices are being brought up, such as ‘Bringing up interface eth1:’ the process would hang for over an hour. In this example, It’s not that eth1 had wrong MAC address. As a matter of fact, prior to shutting down that VM guest, the eth1 was working properly, and the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 was configured with right MAC address.

Anyway, is there a method to tell or configure the boot process to wait much shorter time to bring an interface up? In above given example, an hour was too long.