If you deploy EJB1.jar to node1, EJB2 to node2, etc, wouldn't it do what you want?

-Ben

You're going to need 3 partitions -- "Group1", "Group2" and "DefaultPartition" (which JBoss provides for you). Chapter 3 in the Clustering docs explain how to configure a partition. You'd need to deploy your, for example, group1-partitiion-service.xml on nodes 1 and 2, and your group2-partition-service.xml on nodes 3 and 4. Farming can't help you with this.

You can also create your own separate instance of the farming service that will work with your new partitions. Chapter 7 of the Clustering docs explain how to do this. You'd have a farm service associated with your group1 partition, which would look in a directory called, for example, group1-farm for files to deploy to its partition. Equivalent thing for group2. You'd need to deploy your, for example, group1-farm-service.xml on nodes 1 and 2, and your group2-farm-service.xml on nodes 3 and 4. Again, the default farming can't help you with this, as you need to restrict deployment to certain nodes.

Once all this is done, you can drop your Group1EJB1 in your group1-farm directory and it will be deployed on nodes1 and 2. Equivalent thing for Group1EJB2. SharedEJB3 is deployed to the standard farm folder.

If you deploy a copy of the whole cluster-service.xml file, you're going to deploy more than just a partition; i.e. another HA-JNDI, etc. To get the farming to work, just deploy the cluster partition MBean. Whether you want a separate instance of things like HASessionStateService, cache invalidation bridge, etc. really depends on the architecture of your app and is probably too complex for a forum discussion.

Do you just want to deploy certain beans on certain nodes, but have them visible via JNDI from all nodes? If so, just do the farming part, and leave the <partition-name> element in each bean's jboss.xml set to DefaultPartition. This has the same effect as if you'd deployed Group1EJB1 to node1 and 2 without using farming.

In the partition config for your group1 & 2 partitions, don't just change the partition name. Also change the multicast address and port in the UDP section of the config. Otherwise the low-level JGroups protocols will have to process and discard packets meant for the other partitions.

Re: farming, if you use the general farming service to deploy your group1 & 2 farm services, JBoss will try to deploy the group1-farm-service.xml on a machine with no group1 partition, and the deploy will fail.