Everything works when packed to appropriate archives but I wanted to try exploded development to improve redeployment time.

vod-ear-2.0.0.ear is exploded EAR (huge!)

metadata-import-ejb-2.0.0.jar is exploded EJB JAR archive, it contain simple persistence.xml just referring ../cmm-ejb-2.0.0.jar entities.

cmm-ejb-2.0.0.jar is exploded EJB JAR archive, it contains entities referenced by metadata-import-ejb-2.0.0.jar

All other WAR, EJB JARs are exploded as well.

This configuration gives me this deploy error:

ObjectName: persistence.units:ear=vod-ear-2.0.0.ear,jar=metadata-import-ejb-2.0.0.jar,unitName=metadataimport-unit
 State: FAILED
 Reason: java.lang.RuntimeException: error trying to scan <jar-file>: file:/C:/jboss/jboss-4.0.5.GA/server/vod/deploy/vod-ear-2.0.0.ear/metadata-import-ejb-2.0.0.jar/cmm-ejb-2.0.0.jar
 I Depend On:
 jboss.jca:service=DataSourceBinding,name=jdbc/ContentDS
 Depends On Me:
 jboss.j2ee:ear=vod-ear-2.0.0.ear,jar=metadata-import-ejb-2.0.0.jar,name=ImportProductSession,service=EJB3
 jboss.j2ee:ear=vod-ear-2.0.0.ear,jar=metadata-import-ejb-2.0.0.jar,name=ImportTaskSession,service=EJB3