To be completely honest, I only post in this forum (converter). I do not know if there is a specific channel for consolidation issues.
From what I do know, consolidation is a plugin created from the original "capacity planner" tool which is used to collect statistics of your physical machines and (simply put) generate a general recommendation of which machines can be converted and to which ESX host.
If your primary goal is to convert a specific machine(s), then you might not need to run the consolidation tool (which pretty much needs 24 hours to collect data). You can simply enable the converter plugin and choose "import" when rightclicking the host. You can also download converter as a standalone install www.vmware.com/downloads/converter/ Just be sure you dont install it on your virtualcenter server (causes issues) but rather install it to a proxy virtualmachine or directly onto the machine you are converting.