Meeting Installation Requirements

Before you install Parallels Plesk Panel on your server, make sure the following requirements are met:

Microsoft Windows 2003 Server or Microsoft Windows 2008 Server is installed on your system.
An IP address should be configured in OS prior to Parallels Plesk Panel 9.5 for Windows installation. The IP address received via DHCP will be converted into a static one when you change IP pool.
In order for your server to support domain performance configuring, you need to enable QoS Packet Scheduler service.
Internet Information Server (IIS) is installed on your system with WWW and FTP support.
Your server is NOT working as a Windows Domain Controller (neither primary nor backup). If this requirement is not fulfilled, a system crash may occur during the creation of domains with certain names.

Attention: Parallels Plesk Panel must be installed on NTFS partitions. We strongly recommend that you install Parallels Plesk Panel on a clean server. Only the required operating system components should be installed. If you have to choose a role for your server, select the Application Server role.

The following things should be taken in consideration before installing Parallels Plesk Panel or some of its specific components:

If you want to use SSI, ASP and FrontPage services, select the respective components during the installation of IIS.
If you want to install the Tomcat component included with Parallels Plesk Panel installer, please make sure that the folder where Tomcat will be installed has no national or special characters in its name. The following characters are allowed: basic Latin characters, numerals, space and the following symbols: !#$%&()+,-.:;=@[]_{}.
If you want to use ColdFusion:
- ColdFusion should be installed separately before installing Parallels Plesk Panel.
- If you intend to use ColdFusion support in Parallels Plesk Panel, ColdFusion should be installed on the server with Default Web Site chosen on the Web Server Selection step of installation. Otherwise, if you choose All IIS Websites, ColdFusion support will always be activated for all domains that have physical hosting, regardless of the corresponding check box status.
If you want to use Microsoft SQL Server DBMS support in Parallels Plesk Panel:
- Microsoft SQL Server should be installed and configured to use standard or mixed security mode. By default, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is installed with Parallels Plesk Panel. Alternatively, you can select to install Microsoft SQL Server 2008, but there are the following prerequisites to it:
  - Windows Installer 4.5;
  - Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 (it can be obtained with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1);
  - Windows Server 2003 SP2 or higher.
- If Microsoft SQL Server is not installed, you can select Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition on Windows 2003 platform and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition on Windows 2008 platform to be installed with Parallels Plesk Panel and configured with administrator name 'sa' and random password, which you can change later on the Home > Database servers page.
- If you want to use external Microsoft SQL Server (in case it was installed before Parallels Plesk Panel), you need to supply the required password on the Home > Database servers page.
If you have AVG antivirus on your system, you need to disable it during Parallels Plesk Panel installation, upgrade or template deployment, to avoid its conflict with DrWeb. AVG detects drwebcom.exe as a virus and prevents file coping. This leads to Parallels Plesk Panel installation (upgrade) failure.

Due to the large quantity of various software available on the market, Parallels cannot guarantee compatibility with all third-party software products, except when explicitly stated otherwise. Please exercise special caution when using various antivirus and firewall software that has issues with blocking of potentially dangerous programs, because such software is known to malfunction when working on the server with installed Parallels Plesk Panel.