The following sentence makes me believe the only consistent cache strategy is using a single database for all nodes in the cluster. It is in "Chapter 2. Core Concepts" of hibernate 3.3.1 guide: Concurrent cache updates of the same entity anywhere in the cluster should not be possible, as Hibernate will acquire an exclusive lock on the database representation of the entity before attempting to update the cache. Should I be using the same DB for all nodes? Is there any solution you can think of to be using one DB per node and have the DBs in synch as the cache is ? View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4224809#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...