PowerPath and AIX upgrade procedure with NIMADM

Hello:

I understand that when upgrading AIX in the traditional sense, I am supposed to uninstall PowerPath, upgrade AIX, then reinstall PowerPath, per documentation.  However, what about AIX upgrades using IBM's NIMADM (Network Installation Manager Alternate Disk Migration)?

What it does is that I have a NIM server that holds the AIX OS media.  And my AIX server (NIM client) will talk to the NIM server, and clone the OS to an empty disk while the system is up and running, and apply the AIX upgrade to that cloned disk.  And at a later time of my choosing, I pick a downtime and boot off of the newly upgraded cloned disk.

In this case, as long as I am not SAN booting, do I still need to uninstall PowerPath before the upgrade, and reinstall after the upgrade?  The whole purpose of NIMADM is to reduce the downtime needed to upgrade AIX.  But if I am forced to uninstall PowerPath prior to the NIMADM process, it buys me no reduction in downtime, but in effect more downtime because the cloning process is an additional time (usually 1 hour) on top of the actual upgrade itself.

Thanks in advance!

John