The "perf top" command on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 VMWare guest does not show expected output

Issue

When running "perf top" on a bare metal RHEL 6 server the output provided is similar to the following:

$ perf top
...
PerfTop:     204 irqs/sec  kernel:64.7%  exact:  0.0% [1000Hz cycles],  (all, 4 CPUs)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

             samples  pcnt function                    DSO
             _______ _____ ___________________________ _______________________

               57.00  4.9% _raw_spin_lock_irqsave      [kernel.kallsyms]      
               41.00  3.5% vfprintf                    /lib64/libc-2.14.90.so 
               36.00  3.1% native_read_tsc             [kernel.kallsyms]      
               31.00  2.7% __memset_sse2               /lib64/libc-2.14.90.so 
               31.00  2.7% __schedule                  [kernel.kallsyms]      
               30.00  2.6% update_cfs_shares           [kernel.kallsyms]      
               29.00  2.5% vmx_vcpu_run                [kvm_intel]            
...

However when running perf top on this VMWare guest provides no information:

$ perf top
...
PerfTop:       0 irqs/sec  kernel:-nan%  exact: -nan% [1000Hz cycles],  (all, 4 CPUs)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

             samples  pcnt  DSO
             _______ _____  
...