Last week I mentioned that I was working on a Quality of Service (QoS) project. For those who are curious about QoS and how to get it working, here are the resources I found most useful. These resources are mostly Cisco specific, but the principles should be applicable in many situations.

Books

These are the books I've used recently or in the past. If you have a Safari Books Online account, you can most likely find them there.

• End-to-End QoS Network Design: Quality of Service in LANs, WANs, and VPNs by Tim Szigeti and Christina Hattingh. Although this book is a little dated now, it's still full of invaluable information for any network architect just getting started in QoS.
• CCVP QOS Quick Reference Sheets by Kevin Wallace. I originally grabbed this because it's fairly inexpensive. In the end, I found it to be more valuable than I originally anticipated.

Web Pages

• Cisco AutoQoS White Paper [QoS Configuration and Monitoring]
  Cisco introduced AutoQoS to simplify QoS networks in Cisco homogeneous networks. If you happen to be in such a situation, go for it.

At-a-Glance

The At-a-Glance documents are one page PDFs published by Cisco. Each one focuses on a specific topic and is a fine reference.

• QoS Baseline
  This is the most important At-a-Glance document by far. In a way, it is the foundation of your QoS policy, and all other At-a-Glance documents build off it.
• QoS Best Practices
• Branch QoS Design
• Campus QoS Design
• WAN QoS Design

Hardware Specific

Different hardware often has slightly different variations in configuration. I've found it helpful to grab hardware specific documentation in most of the projects I've done.

• Cisco Security Appliance Command Line Configuration Guide: Applying QoS Policies
  This information is specific to Cisco ASA 5500 series software version 8.0.
• Catalyst 2940 Switch Software Configuration Guide: Configuring QoS
  The Cisco Catalyst 2940 is not a great switch for a QoS environment. It's QoS configuration is very limited. If possible, upgrade to the Catalyst 2960 as soon as possible.
• Catalyst 2960 Switch Software Configuration Guide: Configuring QoS
  My project relied heavily on Cisco Catalyst 2960 switches. These switches are fairly powerful for their price point and have a lot of QoS features.
• Voice Over IP On Navini’s Ripwave™ MX
  Navini Networks was bought out by Cisco a while back, but their hardware has not been fully integrated into the Cisco family yet.

As my list of resources grows, I'll keep this post up to date. If you have any suggested resources, feel free to send me an email.