...

Note by default these settings will only affect which jars OpenEJB will scan for annotated components when no descriptor is found. If you would like to use these settings to also filter out jars that do contain descriptors, set the openejb.deployments.classpath.filter.descriptors property to true. The default is false.

Troubleshooting

If you're having trouble determining if the META-INF/ejb-jar.xml file for your ejb module is in the classpath, a little debug code like this in your test setup will help you see what OpenEJB sees (which may be nothing):

Enumeration<URL> ejbJars = this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResources("META-INF/ejb-jar.xml");
while (ejbJars.hasMoreElements()) {
    URL url = ejbJars.nextElement();
    System.out.println("app = " + url);
}