Questions upgrading SAM 5.5 to 6.0.2

Nope. That's it. It's a fairly straightforward process.

I noticed in the Admin Guide that is says you can choose the "Express Install - Recommended" or "Advanced" install.  Which should I choose for the upgrade?  Under Advanced it says "Advanced Install requires and existing SQL Database..." so I'm not sure if I want to choose advanced so I can point it to the existing DB or if Express will find that it is already installed on an existing DB and take those settings.

It seems like the Admin guide doesn't have much about the upgrade steps, but new install steps only.

You have an existing installation so I would recommend going with the "Advanced" installation path. Express will lay down a copy of SQL Express, which is not needed as you obviously have an existing SQL Server instance you are currently using.

Do you recommend stopping all the services on the main NPM/SAM server and the APEs?  I know that is what we did for our NPM upgrade, but wasn't sure if we needed to do that for a SAM module upgrade.

Yes. You should follow the exact same procedure for SAM that you did for NPM.

Do these steps sound right?

1) Stop Solarwinds Services on main server + APEs

2) SQL Guy takes backup of Orion DB

3) VM Snapshot of main NPM server

4) Restart Services on main NPM/SAM server (Stop them on the APEs though correct?)

5) Run SAM install to upgrade (advanced install to point to existing SQL DB?)

6) Run SAM poller install to upgrade APEs

7) Finish

Yes, though step #4 is not necessary.

The update went smoothly.  It took about an hour to do the upgrade on the main server and the 5 APEs.