In JBoss 3.2+, three load balancing options are available. The Round-Robin and First Available options have the same meaning as the ones in JBoss AS 3.0.x.

The new load balancing option in JBoss 3.2 is "First AvailableIdenticalAllProxies" (org.jboss.ha.framework.interfaces.FirstAvailableIdenticalAllProxies). It has the same behaviour as the "First Available" policy but the elected target node is shared by all client-side interceptors of the same "family".

In JBoss 3.2 (and later), the notion of "Proxy Family" is defined. A Proxy Family is a set of stub interceptors that all make invocations against the same replicated target. For EJBs for example, all stubs targeting the same EJB in a given cluster belong to the same proxy family. All interceptors of a given family share the same list of target nodes. Each interceptor also has the ability to share arbitrary information with other interceptors of the same family. A use case for the proxy family is give in Section 1.3.1, “Stateless Session Bean in EJB 2.x”.