A BIG-IP Administrator reviews the Plane CPU Usage performance chart and discovers a high percentage of Control Plane utilization. Which type of…

The BIG-IP system architecture is divided into a control plane and a data plane. The control plane is responsible for system management and administrative tasks, such as processing requests from the command-line interface (CLI), the web-based Configuration utility, and SNMP. High CPU utilization on the control plane indicates a heavy load from these administrative functions. Application traffic, including tunnel and accelerated traffic, is handled by the data plane's Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM), which uses separate CPU resources.

B. Tunnel: Tunnel traffic is processed by the data plane (TMM), not the control plane.

C. Accelerated: Accelerated traffic is handled by specialized hardware and the data plane, offloading the CPU, not increasing control plane usage.

D. Application: General application traffic is the primary responsibility of the data plane (TMM), which has dedicated CPU cores.

1. F5 Networks. (2021). TMOS Operations Guide, Chapter 2: The BIG-IP System. F5 Networks Documentation. "The control plane is the component of the BIG-IP system that you use to manage the system... Examples of control plane tasks are using the Configuration utility to create a virtual server..."

2. F5 Knowledge Base. (2022). K15202: The BIG-IP data plane and control plane. "The control plane consists of a set of processes that run on the main CPU... These processes are used for system management, administration, and monitoring."

3. F5 Knowledge Base. (2020). K10232: The BIG-IP system architecture. This document provides a diagram and description separating the control plane (Linux host OS) from the data plane (TMM).