Portfolio + Blog: multisite or plugin?

Set your blog as Blog category and your portfolio as Portfolio category.
You might be also interested in Custom Post types (which I think is the right way to do it):

Run your Blog as a usual via Posts and set the Portfolio as Custom post type with its own categories, tags or what ever taxonomy you need.

Read more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Types

Multisite is a completely different concept.