OK, so it sounds like you've seen http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=ReplicatedCounter since you're using the Counter.war. So, I'm going to be very brief; if you have any questions refer back to that page and the pages linked from it. JBoss AS is not a load balancer. A load balancer is an external process that listens on a known address/port and sends requests to a set of servers it is managing. It hides the mechanism it uses to communicate with the servers from the client; the client just needs to know the address/port of the load balancer. You need to configure an external load balancer if you want some external process to survive the shutdown of an AS and send requests to the ASs it's balancing. The fact that an AS is listening on port 8009 doesn't mean there is a load balancer somewhere. It just means that *if* there were a load balancer out there that uses the AJP protocol (e.g. mod_jk running on Apache httpd), that load balancer could contact that AS using port 8009. When you type http://IPADDRESS:8180/Counter/index.jsp you are telling your browser to directly contact an AS instance via HTTP. If you shut down that AS instance, of course a second request to that URL will not work. When you type http://IPADDRESS:8280/Counter/index.jsp you are telling your browser to directly contact the second AS instance via HTTP. That works, since that 2nd AS instance is still running. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4098937#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...