I'm going to need to migrate multiple Linux servers (running very old versions of Fedora, RHEL and CentOS on x86 hardware) to RHEL 6 on the Power platform. So it's going to be an OS migration AND an architecture migration in one fell swoop. (Yes, I know it's a bad idea, I don't really have a choice in the matter.)

As far as I can figure out, my best option is to build a brand-new RHEL 6 server on the new hardware. Then build a list of packages from the old server and load the appropriate versions onto the new one. Then take the config files for all the applications, see how they were changed from the defaults, and make the appropriate changes on the new server. Then copy over the data.

Is that essentially my only option?
Are there any tools out there to help with this task?
If you've ever done something similar, what are some of the pitfalls to watch out for?

I would keep the old OS and systems intact and run them in VMs in an emulator. QEMU can emulate an x86 platform. Rebuilding it for Power is a much simpler task than migrating a bunch of x86 servers.