We use polycom phones with asterisk systems for several clients. You did not mention whether you were looking at POE switches or not. POE makes the phone roll out much easier.
For what it's worth, we rarely use a cisco switch and have yet felt the need to use it for VoIP. We go cheap and use d-link 10/100 POE switches. We only support small and medium size business. The most complex switch configs we uaually need are setting up three or four vlans. We generally only have gigabit (and typically cicso) switches for server connections in the rack and high traffic users like video editors. The codecs we use for voice seem perfectly capable of traveling over a 100mb connection. At the desk, we plug the phone to the wall jack and plug the PC/laptop to the Polycom. Bill ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
