e-port = LAG member external port. These are the A2/3/4/5
which connect to the ETH fabric
Single GW mode = Means you can take an
entire (or a part of - meaning part of the eports) a group (A, B, C, D) and
configure it to run as a single GW. All the configured eports of that group will
be associated with the port-channel (LAG) configured for that GW.
If no eports are used - the BXM will assume that all the eports are used - and will
not set require any vNIC limitation to the group (aka unlimited).
A group of vNICs in multiple hosts together with a single Gateway form a virtual
Hub (vHub). A gateway = proxy for the IO traffic of all the vNICs in the
vHub, and is associated with a single Gateway port (i.e., a physical Ethernet
wire).
What is meant by "not including Ethernet ports in the port
channel" in order to be able to set unlimitied-VNICs mode? Please refer to the
above. It means not to include eports in a LAG.
Single Gateway mode enables you to save lookup table (AKA context table) space. The new lookup will
be executed by the pair [MAC,VLAN] enabling the vNIC entry to be written only
once instead of per eport (in case you setup the LAG with an specific eports),
hence increasing the number of vNICs configured.
Attaching an eport to a LAG triggers a dump of all vNICs to the eport's context table. With an
“unlimited vNIC” LAG gateway, the number of vNICs might exceed the hardware vNIC
capacity - thus a user cannot use the unlimited flag in this mode (i.e. non-single GW mode)
If a LAG gateway is configured without any eports, it is unnecessary to limit the number of vNICs since no vNIC will be written to the hardware (as there are no per eport context tables - because no eports are
explicitly attached to the LAG)
So - In the Single Mode, the gateway
vNIC count limit it set to unlimited hence not requiring any changes to the
group gateway lookup mode such as in case of 1K/4K modes.
The limitation is 5k vnics for the entire box (when working in global mode of 12 external ports
and 4 internal ports)