OOS (Office Online Server) for Sharefile Step-by-Step -

As I am redoing from scratch my Lab and I have ShareFile, I would like to enjoy the Office Online preview and editing features.

Here after are all the detailed steps to accomplish that.

LAB Infra

Here after is the infrastructure that will be used to make OOS available

Base on the fact that ShareFile is already configured, we will just add 2 OOS servers to create a farm. The farm will be load balanced using NetScaler with SSL Offload between NetScaler HA Pair and OOS Servers.

Prequisite

You need to have a Windows server integrated in your domain (Windows Server 2016 or 2019)

You will first install the Windows Features needed by running the following PoSH command:

Install-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, Windows-Identity-Foundation

You will also need the following:

OOS Installation

Office Online Server can be downloaded from the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC). Office Online Server is a component of Office; therefore, it will be shown under each of the Office product pages including Office Standard 2016, Office Professional Plus 2016, and Office 2016 for Mac Standard.

For customers whose licenses qualify for OOS, but cannot obtain it through the VLSC, the following actions are possible:

VL Open customers can contact their Support Center.
Customers who purchased O365 online from Microsoft can submit a request from their Office 365 admin center or contact support.

After you have retrieved the ISO file, mount it on your server

Double click on Setup

Accept the license agreement and click on Continue

Keep or change the installation folder and click on Install Now

Click on Close

OOS Configuration

After the initial installation we will need to create a farm by running PoSH Command, to be able to do that we will first need to import PoSH module by running the following Command

import-module “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Web Apps\AdminModule\OfficeWebApps\OfficeWebApps.psd1”

Then we need to run the following Command to create a farm

New-OfficeWebAppsFarm -InternalUrl "https://internal-fqdn" -ExternalUrl "https://external-fqdn" -SSLOffloaded -EditingEnabled

Note: On the remaining server of the farm, the command to run is different:

New-OfficeWebAppsMachine -MachineToJoin "FQDN of 1st server"

Note: You will need to create an internal DNS for the OOS Farm

NetScaler Configuration

The NetScaler configuration is pretty simple:

Create a Service Group for the OOS Servers using HTTP as we will SSL Offload the communication (optional: create a specific monitor for the OOS server)
Add the members
Create a LB vServer using SSL (at least disable SSL v3 as Best Practice)

Validate NetScaler configuration

To validate that the NetScaler configuration is correct and the OOS farm is accessible from Internet, you will need to open a Web Browser and point to https://external-fqdn/hosting/discovery

You should see an XML file