Now that you have a good understanding of the overall architecture of Jira, the basic system requirements, and the various installation options, we are ready to deploy our own Jira instances.

In the following exercise, we will be installing and configuring a fresh Jira instance for a small production team. We will perform our installation on a Windows platform with a MySQL database server. If you are planning to use a different platform or database, refer to the vendor documentation on installing the required software for your platform.

In this exercise, you will do the following:

• Install a fresh instance of Jira Software
• Connect Jira to a MySQL database

We will continue to use this Jira instance in subsequent chapters and exercises as we build our help desk implementation.

For our deployment, we will use the following:

• Jira Software server distribution 8
• MySQL 5.7.13
• Microsoft Windows 7