This is to prevent caches that are supposed to be symmetric/identical from being misconfigured. Some elements are allowed to be unique, of course, such as bind addresses in JGroups as well as node names, server hints, certain props passed to cache stores, etc.

A simple test could be a hash (MD5 or SHA1?) of the config XML (or a serial form of the generated Configuration bean) which is exchanged as a part of the join method. On failure of the hash check, the entire object could be checked, and if that fails as well, an appropriate ConfigurationException could be thrown.