I think your problem is in PING: initial_hosts="192.168.181.191[48866] If you are going to use this, the port associated with the peer is not the UDP.mcast_port (48866), it is the UDP.bind_port, which you would need to specify in UDP. If you specify PING.initial_hosts, PING sends UDP unicast messages to each listed member; it does not send a multicast. For the unicast message it needs to know the UDP.bind_port. If you don't specify bind_port, UDP picks an ephemeral port, which obviously you can't list in initial_hosts. With your config, what happens is the initial group discovery fails and each node forms a group by itself. No initial state transfer when you are in a group by yourself. Then MERGE2 kicks in and the groups merge into a single cluster. But a merge does not trigger an initial state transfer. Why are you specifying initial_hosts? Don't if you don't really need to; it's not the usual way to use PING. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4101400#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...