The management network, also referred to as the internal network in some distributions, is used for internal communication between hosts for services such as the messaging service and database service, and can be considered as part of the control plane.

All hosts will communicate with each other over this network. In many cases, this same interface may be used to facilitate image transfers between hosts or some other bandwidth-intensive traffic. The management network can be configured as an isolated network on a dedicated interface or combined with another network as described in the following section.