This is of no help but I figured it out anyway with help from someone else. Your documentation is too scattered and too technical to be of any practical help to anybody. If the topic is how to set up a JBoss cluster, the documentation should explain that and not every other conceivable thing you'd ever want to do with a cluster. Like the watch-time metaphor. In essence, the steps are: a) Download the JBoss archive, not the installer. b) Extract it and copy the "all" directory, naming it anything you want. If you're vertically clustered, you have to make the directory names unique on that host, but horizontal nodes do not have to have unique names. c) Get a multicast address. d) Change the value of mcast_addr in <jboss-home>\server\\deploy\cluster-settings.xml. e) Windows only: change loopback to true in cluster-settings.xml. f) Start the nodes from <jboss-home>\bin\run -c <config-name> g) Check the http://:/jmx-console to make sure the nodes are listed. and are the host name and listen port of any node in the cluster. You need to click service=<partition-name> and look on the next page in the CurrentView row to make sure the IP addresses are all listed. Additional steps are required to change the name of the partition from DefaultPartition. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3964709#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...