Objective 6.2
200-301Compare traditional networks with controller-based networking.
Objective 6.2 sits in Automation and Programmability, which carries 10% of the CCNA exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Cisco page it rests on.
Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Cisco exam page ↗
A worked example
Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.
A campus runs SD-Access with Cisco Catalyst Center. The controller appliance is offline for several hours during a hardware failure. What happens to the fabric?
Correct.
Checked against cisco.com, August 2026Concept
A network controller in a controller-based campus sits outside the forwarding path. Its job is orchestration, monitoring and policy distribution, so losing it removes the ability to change the network rather than the ability to move packets.
Why C
Catalyst Center is not part of the SD-Access data plane or the control plane, so an outage does not touch wired or wireless forwarding. What stops is the management plane: fabric site creation, virtual networks, IP pools, device onboarding, templates and compliance checks, plus assurance dashboards and policy pushes.
Source
Cisco: SD-Access Solution Design Guide, checked August 2026A Catalyst Center outage does not impact SD-Access wired and wireless traffic forwarding, but it does affect: ● All management plane functions: Key areas influenced include fabric provisioning and automation (creation of fabric sites), virtual networks, IP pools, device role assignments (device onboarding), lifecycle management and Plug-and-Play, SWIM, templates, and compliance checks.
Now you: objective 6.2 questions
No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.
Sample question 1 of 3
An engineer onboards 30 access switches into an SD-Access fabric with LAN Automation instead of configuring each switch by hand. Which underlay routing design does the workflow deploy?
Sample question 2 of 3
A campus replaces box by box configuration with an SDN controller. Compared with a traditional network, what changes about where control plane functions run?
Sample question 3 of 3
A vendor argues that separating control and data planes speeds innovation. What does the SDN terminology document say about that claim?
That’s 3 of the full CCNA bank.
Keep going free: 10 questions per certification in bank practice, with no account.
Continue practicingRead the sources
These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.
More objectives in Automation and Programmability
- 6.1 Explain how automation impacts network management.
- 6.3 Describe controller-based, software defined architecture (overlay, underlay, and fabric).
- 6.4 Explain AI (generative and predictive) and machine learning in network operations.
- 6.5 Describe characteristics of REST-based APIs (authentication types, CRUD, HTTP verbs, and data encoding).
- 6.6 Recognize the capabilities of configuration management mechanisms such as Ansible and Terraform.
- 6.7 Recognize components of JSON-encoded data.