Perhaps you are confusing the behavior of the naming proxy vs. the EJB proxy? They are completely independent. If that's not what you're doing, ignore the rest of this, and just treat it as useful info for other people who stumble on this thread. ;-) If you create an InitialContext that connects to an HA-JNDI server, you get a naming proxy that can provides failover and load balancing for *naming operations*. If your context connects to a non-HA JNDI server, then the naming proxy only knows conduct *naming operations* with the server from which it was downloaded. No failover, no load balancing. Either way, when you lookup an EJB, you download a proxy for the EJB. You get the same proxy no matter whether you looked it up via HA-JNDI or regular JNDI. If that EJB is configured as clustered, when you start invoking *ejb operations* on it, those calls will be able to fail over if appropriate, and will be load balanced. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4024386#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...