The EJB client API has a retry capability wherein it retries a failed invocation to run it against some other node. The retry only happens for a certain case where the server side sends back a "no such EJB" response for a EJB invocation request.

However, it also makes sense to retry a request (on a different node) in following cases:

1) Session creation (for stateful EJBs) fails due to some error on a node.
2) A request send itself fails. i.e. a receiver tries to send a method invocation request to a node named "foo" but fails to send out the request.

In both these cases the request can potentially be retried against any available eligible node(s).