From the documentation, it appears that you can take an existing server deployment, and use it as a netboot configuration. However, in practice, it appears that this is not the case.
I've run into problems with the deployers with netboot. Basically, everything that was previously deployed in folders had to be packaged up into their respective .sar, .war, .ear files.
Also, i've had problems with deploying WARs as well as getting JSPs to compile.
All of which worked under my local server installation.
If there are caveats to using netboot, it would be nice to know what they are...
