Without method and observations, you have no chance for solving this kind of problems ...
For begin : hardware and memory : nb of processeurs, kind of processor, size of memory, disk space, space available, processor usage
Secondly, kind of operating system, is the system is update, which services are running
Thirdly, what is in the log (tail -f on many sessions) : many files : syslog, log apache, ...
'console crashes' : what does it mean
Are you sure you followed the tutorial, and which tutorial.
Why you decide to use a 'non LTS' version of Ubuntu ? Why testing on VMware and on Hyper-V ? What's you own level in virtualization ?
As you can understand, help you giving us informations ...
