This article explains installing Plesk 7.5 on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server.

Subsections

Installing Plesk
Configuring Plesk
Performing Administration Tasks
Managing Hosting
Plesk Binaries

Installing Plesk

Before Installation

Plesk 7.5 installation requires Microsoft Windows 2003 Server installed 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, select the respective components during IIS installation.

To use Microsoft SQL with Plesk

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.

To use Tomcat with Plesk

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: !#$%&()+,-.:;=@[]_{}.

To use ColdFusion with Plesk

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.

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.

Installation

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, It allows choosing whether you want to migrate your data to the new Plesk version or delete the old version without migrating anything
4. Depending on the installation type, the installer may ask you to choose installation paths:
5. After that, choose the installation type: Typical, Complete or Custom:
6. Then Plesk installer presents you with the IIS scalability options screen: 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. Enabling 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.
7. When the Installation is finished, restart confirmation is requested
8. After restart, Plesk launches automatically.

In order to complete the Plesk initial configuration, login to Plesk on your host at http://machine.domain_name:8443/ or http://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.

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About the author:
Prashanth K is a B.Tech CSE and has worked on the Windows System administration for over a year in Poornam. His expertise lies primarily on Plesk Windows administration.