Hi,
we have updated to Hibernate 2.5.1.FINAL and are facing the same problem as @Selaron.

In JCacheRegionFactory the method getOrCreateCache is only returning caches defined in jcache.xml but there is no call to cacheManager.createCache to create caches with the default template?
If you overwrite line 79 it is possible to start the application and there are caches created with the default template, for example:

final Cache<Object, Object> cache = cacheManager.getCache( qualifiedRegionName );
if ( cache == null ) {
    return cacheManager.createCache(qualifiedRegionName, new MutableConfiguration<>());
}
return cache;

But what is the right way? the jcache.xml is found by hibernate (testet by renaming it) so there must be another problem or am I getting somthing wrong?