In http://docs.docker.com/swarm/install-w-machine/
There are four machines:
My understanding is swarm-master will control agents, but what is Local used for?
It is for generating the discovery token using the Docker Swarm image.
That token is used when creating the swarm master.
This discovery service associates a token with instances of the Docker Daemon running on each node. Other discovery service backends such as etcd, consul, and zookeeper are available.
So the "local" machine is there to make sure the swarm manager discovers nodes. Its functions are:
See this introduction: