I am running into this problem as well. I am using a work-around based on the suggestion in the forum article mentioned above and Alex's patch on github, but it would be great to be able to use hibernate-ehcache "out of the box" on a modern version of ehcache (enterprise or otherwise). It looks like the current artifacts want to use an over 2 year old version of ehcache-core (2.4.3, I think). The latest available in maven that's not enterprise is the net.sf.ehcache.internal:ehcache-core:2.7.4 I believe, which I tested with my fix, and it works. Also works with the ehcache-ee:2.7.5 version that is used with bigmemory-4.0.5. If there's any way this could be fixed by the time you release 4.3.0.Final that would be awesome, but I don't know if you've set the features to be released there or not.