VMware Hardware Refresh

I have a relatively small VMware environment (5 ESXi hosts and \~100 VMs) that I need to refresh hardware on before end of year. The storage is all connected via iSCSI on SAN in our datacenter. So what would you say is the smoothest transition here to the new hardware? I'm thinking of just spinning up the new hosts as a different cluster and vMotion servers over to the new cluster. Thanks in advance for the suggestions if you see a better way to tackle this.