200-301: Cisco Certified Network AssociateDemo

The data plane is responsible for forwarding traffic and performing packet or frame handling actions based on already-established forwarding state. That includes switching behavior such as looking up a destination MAC address in the MAC address table and applying Layer 2 encapsulation changes like adding or removing an 802.1Q VLAN tag. By contrast, running routing protocols belongs to the control plane, configuration changes via NETCONF belong to the management plane, and generating an ICMP echo reply is traffic processed by the device itself rather than normal transit forwarding.