I have VisualVM profiling working with my Tomcat application now. I needed to add the following parameters to the tomcat startup:
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=8086
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
Here is a nice article on monitoring Tomcat with VisualVM.