I understand what you are going for. I was simply pointing out that all of the needed mechanisms are in place. Configure your ejb-jar.xml, jboss.xml and standalone.xml as needed with property placeholders. By whatever means you come up with, have your build/deploy process spit out a properties file. You could export the to the JAVA_OPTS shell variable, you could have your own wrapper on standalone.sh (or just modify standalone.sh) to read the properties file. Whatever you want to do.