How do you handle QoS for your VoIP environment?

Let's face it, you cannot talk about VoIP without hearing about QoS (Quality of Service) for many companies a VoIP deployment is the only reason they implement QoS. After I think about it for a while, I realize 90% of the companies I've deployed QoS for/at were in preparation for or to improve a previous voice deployment. The first question I used to get is 'Why do I need to deploy QoS? I have 1Gb links that's more than enough bandwidth, well let's go back to basics. In my mind voice is a pretty stable and timid IP stream it’s the rest of the non-VoIP IP traffic that is bursty and rude so from my perspective it's not always a case of managing low-bandwidth links for VoIP traffic, it's a matter of protecting the VoIP RTP streams from all the other day-to-day data traffic. Plus, we also have to consider not every company can afford 1Gb+ private WAN links at every site, so in that case it does become a matter of reserving bandwidth for VoIP traffic.

QoS is definitely one of my favorite topics to discuss & design for, especially because it's one of the topics that every company does differently and they usually have different goals for the QoS implementation.  I'll kick it off with a few points I like to mention out of the gate.

Don't queue TCP & UDP traffic together! This is definitely one of my favorites, I've seen many people out there lump up a bunch of applications together and throw them in a single queue, it sounds like a good idea but remember how TCP & UDP fundamentally behave when packet loss occurs. If the congestion avoidance mechanisms (RED/WRED) kick in and a UDP packet is dropped the flow continues like nothing happened. Where-as if a TCP packet is dropped the stream decreasing the window size and less data gets transferred over time until the endpoints negotiate the window size back up to where it was. You might find yourself in a situation where TCP throughput is suffering but the UDP applications function like normal because they have essentially taken up the whole queue. This is a rather tough situation to troubleshoot.

Get Sign-off from Management - This may sound odd or trivial at first but it is usually best to work with the business (was that layer 8 or 9 again I always confuse those two?) to determine what traffic allows the company to bring in the money. You also might want to take that a step further and ask that same management/business team to put a priority on those business applications, so they can decide which applications can/should be dropped first if bandwidth is not sufficient. After all, the last thing you want to do is explain to your own management or business teams why you are dropping business critical traffic. It is a good idea to make sure they are standing behind your QoS configuration.

Trust boundaries - Deciding where you place your trust boundary can change your configuration & design drastically, after all if you decide to place your trust boundary on a sites edge/WAN router then you only need to worry about the queuing outbound on the WAN and the inbound markings. However if you setup your trust boundary on your access switches then you may also need to consider layer 2 QoS mechanisms and the queuing from the layer 2 device to the upstream layer 3 WAN router. 

Those are a few considerations I take into account when working with a QoS, what else do you consider for deploying QoS in your environment?