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 B
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 2
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 2
A campus replaces box by box configuration with an SDN controller. Compared with a traditional network, what changes about where control plane functions run?
That’s 2 of the full CCNA bank.
Keep going free: 10 questions per certification in bank practice, with no account.
Continue practisingRead 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.