In a clustered server environment, distributed state management is a key service the cluster must provide. For instance, in a stateful session bean application, the session state must be synchronized among all bean instances across all nodes, so that the client application reaches the same session state no matter which node serves the request. In an entity bean application, the bean object sometimes needs to be cached across the cluster to reduce the database load. Currently, the state replication and distributed cache services in JBoss AS are provided via three ways: the HASessionState Mbean, the DistributedState MBean and the JBoss Cache framework.