When workng on versions pervious to Geronimo 2.1.7, remove ejbModule/META-INF/openejb-jar.xml file in the SampleEJB project as it causes deployment issues. See the file highlighted in the image above. However, when using Geronimo 2.1.7, you must include this ejbModule/META-INF/openejb-jar.xml file or else you will encounter NullPointerException error due to a bug issue.