A forwarding flow table request sent by a host device when the host device fails to find a matching forwarding flow table entry for a data packet to be forwarded is received, when a destination MAC address of the data packet is the global virtual MAC address, a forwarding flow table entry is generated according to the global port table; the forwarding flow table entry includes an operation indication of replacing the destination MAC address of the data packet with the matching MAC address found in the global port table; and the forwarding flow table entry is sent to the host device, so that the host device may forward a data packet matching the forwarding flow table entry.