Chapter 11. Planning for Installation on Power Systems Servers
11.1. Upgrade or Install?
While automated in-place upgrades are now supported, the support is currently limited to AMD64 and Intel 64 systems. If you have an existing installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on an IBM Power Systems server, you must perform a clean install to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. A clean install is performed by backing up all data from the system, formatting disk partitions, performing an installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 from installation media, and then restoring any user data.