I use Ubuntu on various servers; unfortunately Ubuntu is increasingly aimed more at a consumer desktop audience, and it tries to do things like boot with a pretty, high resolution splash screen, hide the grub screen, etc. This does not work at all well for a server - it fails with the monitors on datacenter crash carts, it fails with many KVMs, DRACs, etc.
In order to get back to a more sane console, edit /etc/defaults/grub and make the beginning look like:
GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nosplash xvga=640x480"
GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""