Hey,
Because the server was extensively slow, I have no recent backup. My questions are;
- The sbs 2011 has been booting up for an hour now, is he in the process of consolidating?
- Should I force a shutdown of the VM and do a consolidation?
The answer to first question is no. Snapshot consolidation would not happen automatically after a reboot. If there are many snapshots, the VM might take a long time to power on.
My suggestion would be to leave the VM till it either boots up or dies and then do a consolidation
The below KB should help
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2003638
If this does not work, next course of action would be to manually consolidate but for that, it is advisable to first backup the contents of the VM folder, as any mishap with the snapshot files can potentially lead to dataloss.
Regards
a