Installation Process

To install Plesk 7.5 for Windows:

1. Log in as "Administrator" or another user with Administrator's privileges.
2. Run the installer (either web installer or network installer). Follow the on-screen instructions.
3. If your machine has previous version of Plesk installed, the following screen appears:

   

4. It allows choosing whether you want to migrate your data to the new Plesk version or delete the old version without migrating anything.

   Warning: As the migration process was only tested in artificial (simulated) environments, individual issues might appear during migration of real systems. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you back up your system before starting the migration process.

   Note: If you use the option of deleting of all your current data, only data in Plesk is deleted - sites in IIS are not deleted as a fallback measure in case something goes wrong. So, if you do not need them, you must delete them manually after installing Plesk.

5. There also can be issues with file locking during migration if you use some third-party components placed in Plesk installation folders. Therefore, uninstall all third-party software from Plesk folders before starting the migration. If you need these components, you will have to reinstall them after the migration.

   Note: if Plesk 7.0 for Windows was installed on Windows 2000 (which has IIS 5.0), but you installed Windows 2003 Server (having IIS 6.0) after that and now want to install Plesk 7.5 for Windows with migration, Plesk installer will not switch IIS 6.0 into the IIS 5.0 compatibility mode, which may cause some issues with sites functioning.

   During migration from Plesk 6.5 for Windows, problems with long user names can appear. Therefore, you must reduce the following users' names down to 15 characters via the control panel: web users' names, FTP/FrontPage users' names, and subdomain users' names.

6. If your machine has Helm control panel installed, Plesk will ask you whether you want to migrate all your Helm data to Plesk or delete them:

   

   We recommend backing up the system before starting the migration process. The process of migration from Helm is fully described in the "Helm to Plesk 7.5 for Windows Migration Guide". Please, read it before starting the migration, because it presents detailed information on the mapping between Helm and Plesk objects and actions you should take after the migration.

7. Depending on the installation type, the installer may ask you to choose installation paths:

   

8. After that, choose the installation type: Typical, Complete or Custom:

   

9. Then Plesk installer presents you with the IIS scalability options screen:

   

   Windows has a notion of desktops where applications write their output to. By default, IIS allocates a new desktop for each application pool it creates. However, application pools do not have any graphical output and this could be a waste of memory to allocate separate desktops for each of them. Selecting the Enable the use of a Shared W3WP Desktop check box allows IIS to allocate one shared desktop for all World Wide Web Worker Processes (W3WP). Note that sometimes this setting could cause problems. Use the following Microsoft resources to get more information on this topic:

   http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;184802

   http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/IIS/6/all/techref/en-us/iisRG_SCA_34.mspx

10. When the installation is finished, restart confirmation is requested.
11. After restarting, Plesk launches automatically.

In order to complete the Plesk initial configuration, you need to login to Plesk on your host at https://machine.domain_name:8443/ or https://IP-address:8443/

The default user name is "admin" and the default password is "setup". Both are case sensitive. For security reasons this password should be changed upon the initial login.