This has been posted on the JBoss forum as well, but we figured it would be worth posting it here as well in case anyone who's used Hibernate and JBoss had any suggestions.

We are seeking advice for sharing 2nd-level cache between cluster nodes using Tomcat, Spring, and Hibernate. If you have been successful doing this, we'd appreciate hearing from you.
We'd also appreciate learning about dead-ends we might avoid.

Our configuration:
-- Tomcat 6.0.14
-- Spring 2.0.4
-- Hibernate 3.2.5
-- Spring-supplied HibernateTransactionManager
-- JBoss Cache 1.4.1.SP9 (JBC)

Our experiences to date:
-- pessimistic locking and replication sync work well, except under
moderate load where we get ReplicationException's and missing
updates to the database.
-- async and invalidation_sync did not replicate our caches correctly

Specific questions we have:

Will it be possible to use JBC reliably using a non-JTA transaction manager such as HibernateTransactionManager?

If a JTA transaction manager should be used, which one would you recommend?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Did you manage to get this to work?