As far as I know, a TCP/IP stack can only maintain an absolute maximum of 65535 concurrent connections; while reading the white-paper for some F5 BigIP load balancers, I see that these can hold open millions of concurrent connections;
I am specifically looking at the lowest end model, the 2000s, which states that it can maintain 5 million concurrent connections.
At an OS level, how is this managed? Can there only be 65535 per copper / fiber link? Would this mean it would require 75+ uplink connections in order to even hit this limit?