I think that's because you're looking up the remote interface of userEao. Based on my experience, every single invocation to a remote interface (despite the target session bean is in the same environment) creates a new transaction/entitymanager, so the behavior you described above makes sense. If you want all your code to span a single transaction just try pulling the local interface from JNDI. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4257434#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...