Comment by jiggawatts

This type of thing a surprisingly common mistake, I've come across it several times in industry.

An example of this done right: If you disconnect a SAN volume from VMware and attach it to a completely different cluster, it's readable. You can see the VM configs and disks in named folders. This can be used for DR scenarios, PRD->TST clones, etc...

Done wrong: XenServer. If you move a SAN volume to a new cluster, it gets shredded, with every file name replaced by a GUID instead. The file GUID to display name mapping is stored in a database that's only on the hosts! That database is replicated host-to-host and can become corrupted. Backing up just the SAN arrays is not enough!