Not quite true. What I have done so far is to introduce this possibility. What happens right now is that there is only a single RegionFactory implementation which simply "bridges" to the old CacheProviders. Or perhaps what you meant was "separate caches" = "separate regions", as opposed to "separate cache instances"? I think this is going to depend exactly on the different configuration options/parameters that need to get applied to the cache instances used by the different Hibernate regions (of course until we have the capability to natively configure these per region within JBC).