Can you ship the drives including the Controller ?
Anyway - in none of the scenarios for p2V without connection to the destination SAN that I can imagine I would use VMFS on a temporary ESXi.
I would rather use something that can be accessed from Linux and Windows directly: that would be single drives attached via USB or CIFS or NFS-shares.
IMHO the most flexible solution would be a Linux machine that can share logical volumes as CIFS AND NFS and ideally also use iSCSI to serve the drives.
With such a setup you can then use Linux Coldclone Cd, Windows Coldclone CD, current Converter 5.1 for hotclones, robocopy for large NTFS volumes as well as rsync for large Linux volumes.