need best practice for a customer upgrading the underlying VM OS for enterprise prod vertica cluster

An ITOM customer needs to move their Azure IaaS Vertica cluster from old RHEL7.x hosts to newer OS images. Their idea is to bring up another cluster then use replication (presumably vbr) to sync the content, then delete the original VMs and replace them with ones having the same hostnames with the new OS base version, then using replication again to essentially "restore' the original cluster on the new base OS. Does anyone have experience in the field on this kind of use-case? I am sure customers wanting to move off of RHEL 7.x is fairly common. Are there better alternatives?