The use case you just described for EJBTHREE-773 is the typical one I hear about when people complain about the local optimization. In a way, I like not forcing the call to go locally, as it removes a mechanism whereby an SFSB could end up being invoked on 2 different servers. (I just opened a related thread on the proper behavior of the FirstAvailable load balance policy, please see http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=103967. Bill B, you're listed as original author on FirstAvailable, so any comments on that thread are appreciated.) Re: the 2 cluster problem, should the partition name be part of the ejbName for a clustered EJB? That doesn't really solve the problem though, as you can have two network-isolated clusters both named DefaultPartition. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4027630#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...