Creating an Office Web Apps Server 2013 farm with 2 machines

Office Web Apps Server 2013 provides the ability to create a farm with one or more machines in it. Recently I had to create a farm with two machines, and it took a little bit to get my head around how to do it. Here is how I ended up doing it

I had the following environment:

  • Two servers: wac1.contoso.dk and wac2.contoso.dk
  • The internal fqdn of the farm should be wac.contoso.dk and the external fqdn should be wacext.contoso.dk
  • Hardware load balancer configured for wac.contoso.dk

On wac1.contoso.dk

I did the following steps:

  • Installed Office Web Apps Server 2013 and the March 12, 2013 update.
  • Used the MMC certificate snap-in to create a certificate from my internal CA based on WebServer template with:
    • Subject name WacFarm
    • Friendly name WacFarm
    • Subject alternate names of wac1.contoso.dk, wac2.contoso.dk,wac.contoso.dk,wacext.contoso.dk, wac1 and wac2
    • Allow private key to be exported
  • After the certificate was loaded in the personal local computer certificate store, I exported the certificate with the private key to a file
  • Used PowerShell to create the Office Web Apps Farm with the cmd:

On wac2.contoso.dk

I did the following steps:

  • Installed Office Web Apps Server 2013 and the March 12, 2013 update
  • Used the MMC certificate snap-in to import the certificate, I had exported on wac1.contoso.dk, into the personal local computer certificate store
  • Used PowerShell to join wac2 to the Office Web Apps Farm, which has wac1.contoso.dk as the Master
    • New-OfficeWebAppsMachine -MachineToJoin wac1.contoso.dk

The tricky part to get right was the last command. You have to run it on the machine you wish to join to the farm, and you have to reference an existing machine in the farm. It needs the reference to be able to read the farm settings.