Ubuntu 18.04.1 hangs at "Booting SMP configuration" on VMware
I bumped against this as well for several days. Had an idea based off of reading the esxi logs about failing to apply an intel mcirocode update and decided to see if it was possible to remove it and sure enough that fixed it.
Post I got the idea from: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2273643
Had to boot into reovery mode to execute the following commands: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecoveryMode
Commands I ran to get it working.
sudo dpkg -l|grep intel
sudo apt-get purge intel-microcode
sudo update-grub
sudo reboot