Preparing Plesk for Windows for Cloning

Dmitry Bystrov

3 years ago

Install Plesk

Create a clean installation of Plesk. For instructions, see
Installing Plesk for Windows Using Installer Console.
Configure Plesk

Configure Plesk exactly the way you wish the cloned instances to
appear. It may include the following:
- User interface layout through custom views - configured at
  post-install configuration, see Plesk Single Server Post-install
  Configuration.
- Interface preferences and localization, see Appearance and
  Branding.
- Control panel appearance and interface elements, see Customizing
  Plesk Appearance and GUI
  Elements.
- Hosting plans and subscriptions, see Hosting Plans and
  Subscriptions.
- DNS template, see DNS
  Template.
Prepare for Cloning

Use the
%plesk_cli%cloning.exe --update -prepare-public-image true
command to prepare a Plesk instance for cloning. You may also choose
to configure certain additional options:
- Preserve the initial configuration
  
  By default, the cloning.exe command will reset the
  configuration parameters of the instance: each cloned instance
  will have to be configured anew. Use -reset-init-conf false to
  preserve the initial configuration during cloning.
- Reset the license
  
  Optionally, you may choose to remove the product license during
  cloning, so it is not copied throughout the cloned instances. Use
  -reset-license true to accomplish that.
- Disable updates after cloning
  
  After the cloned instance is started, the availability of updates
  for the current version is checked explicitly and the updates are
  installed if necessary. Installation of updates is working under
  the same rules as in daily maintenance task. Updates installation
  can be disabled if option -skip-update true is passed while
  cloning.
When IP pool reconfiguration is enabled, each time the server with
Plesk is restarted, it will rediscover the IP addresses and
reconfigure its IP pool accordingly. Use this when the virtual
servers are allocated IP addresses dynamically. You may skip this
step if the virtual servers you want to copy Plesk onto use static IP
addresses. Also, omitting this option will make Plesk start faster
because Plesk will not have to reconfigure its IP pool on each
startup.
```
%plesk_cli%ipmanage.exe --auto-remap-ip-addresses true
```
For detailed information on the cloning utility, see
cloning.exe: Server Cloning
Settings.
Create a Snapshot

If your software for managing virtual machines supports creating
copies of virtual machines, which is normally true, stop (shut down)
the virtual machine and create the image copy. Otherwise, if images
copying is unavailable, you should use a special shutdown call that
resets some instance data and then copy the machine by available
means. The shutdown is performed by the following command from the
command prompt (cmd.exe):
```
sysprep /oobe /generalize /shutdown
```

Note: When preparing a Plesk instance for cloning, avoid restarting the
psa service and shutting down the virtual machine on which the
instance is installed.

Example: Preparing a Plesk for Windows instance for cloning

The following command prepares Plesk for cloning by resetting sensitive
data and product license while preserving the results of the
post-install configuration, and disabling automatic updates.

%plesk_cli%cloning.exe --update ^
    -prepare-public-image true ^
    -reset-init-conf false ^
    -reset-license true ^
    -skip-update true

(The caret ^ character splits a single long command into multiple lines to make it more readable.)

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