I was finally able to get a simple example working on Apache Karaf using container-managed Enterprise OSGi JPA. Pull request: https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/pull/465/files I would really appreciate it if some of you could grab the following fork and try it out in your own environments – feedback is definitely needed: https://github.com/brmeyer/hibernate-orm/tree/4.2-osgi A simple test client bundle is available as a reference. Something like this will eventually wind up in the doc examples. Instructions are in the README (rough draft). https://github.com/brmeyer/HibernateOSGi There's a few caveats to ORM at this point: 1.) I have not yet tested a bundle creating and maintaining it's own EntityManagerFactory or SessionFactory. Only container-managed has been used so far. 2.) Only basic support for persistence units is available. We have not handled the use of OSGi services to register Integrators, etc. 3.) IMPORTANT: We can currently handle only annotated classes explicitly listed in your persistence unit. There's a few roadblocks preventing us from scanning for mapping files, classes, etc. 4.) The provided feature.xml files are fairly order-specific. Comments within them (and the proposal wiki) outline the issue. The proposal wiki is updated with more info and questions: https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Proposal:-OSGi We're not comfortable releasing this until the community is able to help confirm the fork. Any help is sincerely appreciated! Brett Meyer Red Hat Software Engineer, Hibernate +1 260.349.5732