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Hello Jay,

Yes - the partition alignment is a problem:
grub2 needs at least 63 blocks between the MBR and the first
partition.  Here for you the partition directly starts at block 1,
therefore grub has no way to put its data on the disk.

The root cause is, that all the partitioning tools I found (like
parted or sfdisk) make some 'optimization': they do not what you
state but what they think you want. (And I have the impression that
their 'thinking' includes the moon phases and the biorhythm of the
user :-) .)

Example in your case: sfdisk called with '1 - - *' creates on Ubuntu
Xenial a partition starting from block 1. On Debian 8.4 (my
development machine) it creates a partition starting from 2087.  This
gives some room for grub, but it horrible when it comes to alignment.

Some possible workarounds:
o Use another host for creating the Ubuntu VM
  (and hope, that sfdisk behaves 'better'.)
o Use a more recent version of diskimage-builder:
  some time ago 'sfdisk' was replaced by 'parted'
  (and hope, that 'parted' does a 'better' job for you).
o Under Ubuntu Xenial execute with 1.0.0 installed:
  $ sudo vi /usr/share/diskimage-builder/elements/vm/block-device.d/10-partition
  In line 23 replace
     1 - - *
  with
     2048 - - *
  (Note that this really only works on Ubuntu Xenial.)

Hope this works and helps - was not able to test these things.

If you are interested in some more background information:
I stumbled over the mostly random behavior of these tools last week.
One aspect is, that they optimize things for the current system (e.g.
reading some kernel parameters; especially IO buffer sizes).  These
sizes can be completely different on the target system - which might
lead to very poor disk performance.
During the last days I reworked my patch (which originally used
parted) to directly write the needed info to the boot records. [1]
More details can be found in the comments of MBR.py [2].

Kind regards

Andre

[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/322671/
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/322671/7/diskimage_builder/block_device/level1/MBR.py