The problem was that the call to KernelControllerContextAware.setControllerContext() was happening as part of the InstantiateAction, i.e. before the bean was configured. In other words, when it was serialized/bound into jndi the state had not been set yet. I have moved the KernelControllerContextAware.set/unsetControllerContext() calls to the ConfigureAction for now, but we do need something a bit more fine-grained for these life-cycle aspects. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3986236#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...