Wrapping my head around Plesk 12 (basic questions)

[one2one]

Hey all, I'm running a demo of Plesk 12 to get a feel for it and ran across a few questions I am trying to wrap my head around.

When I was looking at the ways to buy it (Container, Virtual, Dedicated) it led me to believe Plesk was really just a Control Panel that would link to all of your other servers to make up the resources you'd be offering in your plans (web space, FTP, DNS, Mail, stats, etc.)

But after I ran the install on Windows Server 2008 R2 it really looks like it wants the server I installed Plesk on to BE the web server itself (where as it still provides options for me to link an external DNS and Mail server for example).

Is that right? Or could I run an external IIS Web Server and link Plesk to it?

Thanks in advance!

 

[IgorG]

No, external webservers are not supported by Plesk.

 

[kpmedia]

Plesk, like cPanel, wants to own a virgin server.
What you're talking about (I think) is like the now-dead/never-popular Enkompass control panel.

 

[one2one]

Got it. Thanks guys.

New Question.. What external Server link up capability do I have? So my Plesk server will be my webserver.. But I have a SmarterMail server, SmarterStats Server, 2 Microsoft DNS servers, and a MS SQL Server... All are there own VMs. Can I set them up as resources in Plesk so it will reach out and use them when provisioning hosting accounts?

 

[IgorG]

Got it. Thanks guys.

New Question.. What external Server link up capability do I have? So my Plesk server will be my webserver.. But I have a SmarterMail server, SmarterStats Server, 2 Microsoft DNS servers, and a MS SQL Server... All are there own VMs. Can I set them up as resources in Plesk so it will reach out and use them when provisioning hosting accounts?

According to your requests I think that choosing Parallels Plesk Automation would be the best solution for you.

 

[one2one]

If I wanted to run Plesk 12 for the web server, Database, and DNS functions... could I still link it to and External Smartermail Server for mail or would I still need to switch to Plesk Automation?

 

[IgorG]

You can try to use external mailserver. You should set domain MX record to point to an external mail server. Set a high priority for it. In the domains mail section click ON/OFF button to turn the domain's mail service off.