Autonomic functions need a control plane to communicate, which depends on some addressing and routing. This Autonomic Management and Control Plane should ideally be self-managing, and as independent as possible of configuration. This document defines such a plane and calls it the "Autonomic Control Plane", with the primary use as a control plane for autonomic functions. It also serves as a "virtual out-of-band channel" for Operations Administration and Management (OAM) communications over a network that provides automatically configured hop-by-hop authenticated and encrypted communications via automatically configured IPv6 even when the network is not configured, or misconfigured.