I think you're misunderstanding how clustering works. Let me give an overview again. This has also been covered on (many) other threads If you use a connection factory with load balancing = true to *create* a connection to the cluster then subsequent create connection attempts will connect to different nodes in the cluster in a round robin fashion. So connection 1 on node 2, connection 2 on node 3, connection 3 on node 1, connection 4 on node 2 etc. The first node is chosen randomly. When you use one of those connections to *send* messages then all the messages sent by that connection will go to the node that connection is connected to. Different messages sent *do not* get sent to different nodes. That would be extremely hard to do and still maintain transactional semantics without being *extremely* slow. Ok, that's for sending messages, how about consuming messages? If you create a connection, this time to *consume* messages using a connection factory with load balancing = true, then, again, subsequent connection are created to different nodes of the cluster in a round robin fashion. So if you deployed, say, 3 different MDBs on node A with a connection factory with load balancing = true, then they would actually be connected to and consuming from *different nodes of the cluster*. For an MDB installation this is typically not what you want. With MDBs you normally deploy the same set of MDBs on each node of the cluster. So node A, B, and C all have the same set of MDBs. In this scenario it makes no sense for the MDBs one node A to actually be consuming from the nodes B and C. It is far more efficient for the MDBs on node A to be only consuming from node A, the MDBs on node B to be consuming from node B etc. As long as you have a good distribution of connections *sending* messages across the cluster, then this is the optimal configuration. You're not wasting network bandwidth moving messages between nodes when there's a consumer on the local node that could quite happily consume the message. Now, JBM goes one step further. It has something called "message distribution". Consider the case where consumers on node A are slower than consumers on node B. In that case it may make sense to move messages from A to B in order to utilise the cluster effectively. JBM does this automatically. It will transparently shift messages from a queue on node A to a queue on node B according to load. You don't need to connect to the other node directly to do this. Just connect to the local node, JBM does the rest. I hope that helps clear up the confusion. As I say, there have been lots of other threads like this in the past - it's worth taking a look. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158654#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...