None of these are hard limits enforced by the system. They are
guidelines for designing a server that has good overall performance.

* Site collections (Database scope) 50,000 ... Total throughput
degrades as the number  of site collections increases.
* Web sites  (Web site scope) 2,000 ... The interface for
enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well much
* beyond 2,000 subsites.
* Web sites (Site collection) 250,000 - You can create a very
large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example,
100
* sites each with 1000 subsites is 100,100 Web sites.

The 2000 limit is at the web site scope, meaning any one site shouldn't
have more than 2000 subsites. If your sites  are hanging off a site
collection, that number  grows to 250,000 but that's a total number of
sites and subsites under the collection.

but I'm not familiar with these terms. I've been asked the
question that for one Portal, is there a limitation on the number  of
sites/workspaces that should be allowed. I guess from what you are telling me
below, the limitation is 250,000.

I currently have 8 sites. These 8 sites  would be a site collection right? The
maximum number of sites/workspaces under 1 site should be 2,000. So therefore,
the maximum  under my site collection should not exceed 250,000 sites/workspaces.

First check out the capacity planning guide here for portal  stuff:

www.microsoft.com/.../cappisp
s.mspx

The Windows SharePoint Services Admin guide contains information for WSS
sites and limits:

www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx
b19-a6a4-3e33fa13d230&displaylang=en

If you have 8 sites  created under a portal, then they're site
collections. The 250,000 is one of those numbers that gets thrown out
there and I've never gone off and created  this many to see if the
performance would suck. If you're planning for growth the capacity
planning guide will help.