In general a circularity even via jndi cannot work. If we for example prefilled the stateless session bean pools, or some other component references and uses one of these ejbs on startup, its allowed for EjbLink1Bean to lookup EjbLink2Bean from within its PostConstruct callback for example, so its really no different than using an @EJB dependency injection reference. Both imply a startup dependency on the target ejb container. I don't see how I can know this circular dependency is ok and should not be registered with the mc. It requires a very deep analysis of the beans in question to know they have no injection, no life cycle callbacks. All I can see is that a deployment could specify an ignore-circular-dependecies flag to allow this type of deployment to not fail. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4139534#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...