Was just editing some docs and realized our standard example use case for buddy pools is bogus. ;) The example is to use buddyPoolName to group servers so that a server only chooses as a buddy a server on a separate rack with separate power supply etc. If you think about it, this only makes sense if each buddy pool only has 2 servers, one on each rack. As soon as you have 3 servers in a pool, the odds are only 50% that a server will pick one from the other rack as its buddy. Some kind of "exclusive" flag could help here -- i.e., pick my buddy from among those where "this.buddyPoolName.equals(other.buddyPoolName) == false". So then those on rack #1 have buddyPoolName "rack1" and those on rack #2 have buddyPoolName "rack2" and all buddies are on the other rack. Brian Stansberry Lead, AS Clustering JBoss, a division of Red Hat Ph: 510-396-3864 skype: bstansberry