Can you check what the SELinux setting is? Or did you already change it as part of your upgrade to permissive behavior?
In the /etc/selinux/config is the parameter SELINUXTYPE set to permissive? If not, change that and reboot.
If not, you’ve mentioned that you can’t even use services like ssh but have to rely on your KVM. I’d be curious why even that service is failing. If you can see that in the dmesg log and further investigate it via `journalctl -xeu sshd.service’
As for the settings piece, yes, all the settings are stored in the postgresql database that’s (when it works) started before rockstor is runnning. And the settings backup is essentially a json dump of those settings. So, first action on your new system, create a baseline backup of your settings, before doing anything else 
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If the database is running you could investigate the rockon related tables that can be found under the storageadmin database. It will be fairly cumbersome to dig through those tables looking for the information you need to rebuild your Rockons (see @flox’s framework implementation post on how they designed the Rockon functionality. But I’m also not a psql wizard to make this an efficient view.