Never mind about the bit I didn't understand -- it was why this test doesn't always fail. It's because after the failover FirstAvailable picks a new target for the call to the nested bean. Sometimes it picks the local server and we get a failure; sometimes it picks a remote server and we don't get a failure. Remoting isn't really "detecting" the bean is locally available; it just recognizes that the targeted Invoker is in VM and skips the over-the-wire transport stuff. Recognizing that the bean is available locally is really the task of IsLocalInterceptor. I'm starting to feel pretty certain Option A in my previous post is the way to go. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4026099#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...