Steve Ebersole Wondering if maybe we could register SessionFactoryImpl as a lifecycle listener and implement the check in a LifecycleListener#beanManagerInitialized() method?

Of course we would need to be able to say if we are bootstrapping in a CDI environment to not trigger the check in the constructor in this case. I don't know if this information is available.

And as the SF would be already published, I suppose it will be quite a nightmare to clean up everything.

Scott Marlow is Steve's proposal OK with you? It would probably require some documentation but no code changes.