Installing and Configuring Office Web Apps Server for SharePoint 2013 Farm

Having read about the improvements in browser-based file viewing and editing services for Office files by using Office Web Apps Server, particularly for SharePoint 2013 Farm, I have decided to set it up and configure in my own test environment.  Office Web Apps 2013 now requires dedicated server(s), either physical or virtual, where we can set up an Office Web Apps Server farm with load balancing and scale-out capability in addition to high availability, to provide the services to multiple on-premises hosts.

I already set up and configured my SharePoint 2013 virtual machine (running on Windows Server 2012) on my Windows 8 laptop.  I got a domain controller, named corp.com set up in the virtual machine.  So the next step for me is to set up a new virtual machine to run the Office Web Apps 2013.  Below are the steps that I performed (for HTTP connection to Office Web Apps Server):

• Create a new virtual machine, including a new virtual hard disk using the Hyper-V Manager. 
• Create Internal Network Virtual Switch on the Hyper-V Manager and configure the new virtual machine to use it so that the new virtual machine can talk with my existing SharePoint 2013 virtual machine.  Similarly I need to configure my SharePoint 2013 virtual machine to use this Internal Network Virtual Switch as well.
• Install Windows Server 2012 and configure its Network Settings (IPv4) to be in the same network segment as my SharePoint 2013 virtual machine.
• Rename my new virtual machine's computer name to "owa" and join it to the "corp.com" domain.
• Open the Windows PowerShell prompt as an administrator and run the following commands to install the required roles and services.  Restart the virtual machine once completed:

Add-WindowsFeature Web-Server,Web-Mgmt-Tools,Web-Mgmt-Console,Web-WebServer,Web-Common-Http,Web-Default-Doc,Web-Static-Content,Web-Performance,Web-Stat-Compression,Web-Dyn-Compression,Web-Security,Web-Filtering,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-App-Dev,Web-Net-Ext45,Web-Asp-Net45,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-Includes,InkandHandwritingServices

• Install Office Web Apps 2013 on the virtual machine.
• Create the Office Web Apps Server farm:

New-OfficeWebAppsFarm –InternalURL "http://owa.corp.com" –AllowHttp -EditingEnabled

• Verify that the Office Web Apps Server farm was created successfully by typing http://owa/hosting/discovery in the web browser of the virtual machine.  If Office Web Apps Server works as expected, you should see a Web app Open Platform Interface (WOPI)-discovery XML file in your web browser, as in below screen capture:

The next step is to configure SharePoint 2013 farm to use Office Web Apps Server.  Hence below steps are to be performed on the SharePoint 2013 virtual machine:

• Open an elevated SharePoint 2013 Management Shell in Windows Server 2012 (run as Administrator)
• Create the binding between SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps Server by running the following command:

New-SPWOPIBinding -ServerName "owa.corp.com" -AllowHTTP

• View the WOPI zones for the SharePoint bindings by running the following command:

Get-SPWOPIZone

• Change the WOPI zone to internal-http:

Set-SPWOPIZone –zone “internal-http”

• Change the AllowOAuthOverHttp setting in SharePoint 2013 to True:

$config = (Get-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig)
$config.AllowOAuthOverHttp = $true
$config.Update()

• Verify that the setting has been set to True:

(Get-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig).AllowOAuthOverHttp

• Verify that Office Web Apps is working.  Go to a SharePoint 2013 document library that contains Office documents and view a Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or OneNote file. The document should open in a browser that displays the file by using Office Web Apps.

That's it.  Give yourself a try....