I don't know the details of this issue. Apparently you created it.. I would guess it's a classloader initialization issue, we might be able to workaround it as I did in Search for a similar reason.

What is an "External CacheManager" ?

Generally speaking, yes the Infinispan team could make such things easier. Somewhat related we have:

• https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-4842
• https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-5173