There are several reasons to run a fully-fledged Infinispan Server rather than invoking the Infinispan's internal helpers to start an almost-server.

• We need to isolate the Hibernate Search dependencies of the server from ours
• The "full" Infinispan Server could be slightly different, e.g. we mimic the same configuration but it might diverge in the future
• The "full" Infinispan Server - being built on WildFly - exposes some management operations which we might eventually need to drive directly, e.g. for OGM-1170 Open

The downside is execution time of the testsuite; I'll attempt to trim the container of unnecessary components and clustering features, as we mainly will need a single node.