As I study for my VCP6-DCV I'm trying to get a better understanding of dynamic vs. ephemeral port binding for dvPortGroups. After doing some research (see below) I need to conform some things.
1) Because ephemeral ports act like ports on standard port groups and VMware refers to this as "no binding" what VMware really means is that port binding is in effect delegated to the ESXi hosts.
2) Therefore, the difference between dynamic vs. ephemeral is that in the case of dynamic ports the vdSwitch does the actual port binding (at VM power-on), but in the case of ephemeral ports the host is doing the port binding.
3) Does this mean that ephemeral ports don't count against the "Ports per distributed switch" and "Distributed virtual network switch ports per vCenter" configuration maximums?
[1] vNetwork Distributed PortGroup (dvPortGroup) configuration (1010593) (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1010593)
[2] Configuring vNetwork Distributed Switch for VMware View (http://myvirtualcloud.net/configuring-vnetwork-distributed-switch-for-vmware-view/)
[3] Static, Dynamic and Ephemeral Binding in Distributed Switches (http://www.vmskills.com/2010/10/static-dynamic-and-ephemeral-binding-in.html)
[4] ESXi/ESX Configuration Maximums (1003497) (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003497)