Installing Plesk 7.5 for Windows

This chapter describes the installation process for Plesk 7.5 for Windows. There are two types of Plesk 7.5 for Windows installers:

• Web installer. This is a small executable, which will check the system configuration, download required components, check for updated setup version, download setup file(s) and run setup. Optionally, it can automatically install all released updates.
• Network installer. This is rather big executable file, which contains all components required by Plesk. Besides that, there are no differences between these two installer types.

Before downloading one of the installers, check the Requirements section of this guide.

Requirements

The Plesk 7.5 installation requires Microsoft Windows 2003 Server installed on your system and configured with static IP-address and QoS Packet Scheduler service enabled. IIS should be installed with WWW and FTP support. Plesk must be installed on NTFS partitions.

In order for your Windows 2003 Server to support SSI, ASP and FrontPage you need to select the respective components during IIS installation.

Note: Do not install Plesk on the machine serving as Windows Domain Controller, either primary or backup. If this requirement is not fulfilled, a system crash may occur in case when one creates a Plesk domain, which name coincides with the Windows Domain name.

Plesk 7.5 for Windows does not work when Domain Controller is installed on the server.

If you plan to use Microsoft SQL Server DBMS support in Plesk, Microsoft SQL Server should be installed and configured to use standard or mixed security mode. If Microsoft SQL Server is not installed, you can select Microsoft Database Engine to be installed with Plesk and configured with administrator name 'sa' and random password, which you can change later on the Server > Databases page. If you chose to use external Microsoft SQL Server (i.e. if it was installed before Plesk), user should supply the password on the aforementioned page.

Warning: We strongly recommend that you install Plesk on a clean server; specifically, only the above-mentioned operating system components should be installed.

If you want to install the Tomcat component included with Plesk 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 intend to use ColdFusion support in Plesk, 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 with enabled Physical hosting, regardless of the corresponding checkbox status.

Note: If you install ColdFusion on your server being logged in to Plesk, you should log out of the control panel and log in again in order for Plesk to detect ColdFusion.

Because there is infinite variety of computer system configurations, SWsoft cannot guarantee compatibility with any software. Therefore, there are some programs that cannot work with Plesk. They are listed below:

• Microsoft Free Sharepoint,
• Personal Tiny Firewall,
• F-Prot Antivirus,
• Black Ice,
• other antivirus/firewall software that may have malfunctions in blocking of potentially dangerous programs.