To continue your use case beyond what you wrote to include actual use of the context: Object foo = context.lookup("Foo"); .... then server context has connected to fails or is shut down Object bar = context.lookup("Bar"); 1) With case2, the lookup of "Bar" will succeed; with case1 it will not. The case2 client side naming proxy includes clustering behavior that supports transparent failover. 2) In the above example, with case2 the lookups will be load balanced to the available servers; in case 1 they will all go to server1. 3) If "Foo" were only bound in JNDI on server2, the lookup of Foo will fail in case1; with case2 the server-side HA-JNDI service on whatever server the client connects to will transparently find Foo and return it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4059308#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...