My colleague asked me whether it's possible somehow to deploy a .war file, containing a servlet with an @EJB reference to a stateless session bean, on JBoss server A, and an ejb .jar file, containing the bean so referenced, on JBoss server B.

My immediate answer was no, but then I hesitated. Perhaps there's a vendor specific way to accomplish this?

The broader context is that we're looking to see what we'd have to do if a client of ours were to want to scale horizontally--i.e. have many .war instances all talking to a remote, behind-the-DMZ EJB server. Personally I think this is a bad idea, since the web tier is rarely the bottleneck point, but supposing we had a particularly difficult customer who wanted to do this--is there anything we could tell him?

Ordinarily, of course, you'd ship the .war file and the EJB .jar file as part of an .ear file, dump it in one server, and scale the server (i.e. garden variety clustering, or vertical scaling, or whatever you want to call it). But we have customers who like for whatever reason to put their web stuff on one box and their business logic on another.

Any pointers are gratefully appreciated.

Best,
Laird