Yes, I know this thread is old but since not much has been said on it...
I have the same issue and I am not running a load balancer. The tests are running locally on my machine, in a RAD/Websphere environment. I noticed that, in my case, only the first test would fail with no result. After that, the other tests would run normally. So, what did I do? I created a dummy test which fails. I put it first in my file to (make it more likely that it will) make it run before the other tests.
It sorta works. The error is not caught, so I always get a failure in the dummy test. However, the other tests run and function as expected.
Another way to make it work is to run the test suite twice, without redeploying the war or the restarting the server.
I don't understand the behaviour, however. Any insight appreciated,
L