At this time, because of differences in the remote and local Infinispan interfaces, ModeShape cannot use a remote cache directly. Instead, the only way to get this to work is to use a local cache with a remote cache store, which means that your local cache will still bring on demand the persisted content into memory locally but that the content will actually be persisted in the remote cache. Yes, there is the extra overhead of dealing with a remote cache store, though it sounds like you still prefer this topology over a local or clustered cache. I've updated the ModeShape clustering documentation accordingly.

We'll have to see how/whether these Infinispan interfaces change in Infinispan 6, and will have to adapt in our 4.0 release.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but with the remote cache store you can't actually achieve the same topology as in the Modeshape docs, cause the cache is still local just that it loads and persist to a remote cache, but you still have to do the clustering configuration at the app level, instead of letting the remote cache deal with all the clustering stuff.

That is correct.

It would be nice feature for 4.0 to allow the use of RemoteCacheManager.

Feel free to log a feature request in our JIRA.

Nope, it's perfect. Thanks!