So restoring the UCS is a really good place to start, 100% agree. There are a number of caveats when doing that though.
I've had the most luck when doing this kind of thing if I can get rid of all the things that are hardware specific, like interface configurations etc, before creating a UCS and trying to restore on a dissimilar platform. If that VE is in a "production" state, that's probably not doable.
A quick search got this information. This is using an SCF file rather than a UCS. Never done it that way, always hacked my way through the bigip.conf and bigip_base.conf.
http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/14000/900/sol14906.html
If you want to use a UCS, give this a shot.
Backup / Restor using a UCS
http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/13000/100/sol13132.html
Heads up on SSL encrypted keys.
http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/9000/400/sol9420.html
HTH
Cameron