Thanks for the reply Max. I now specify the local datasource against DefaultDS. I also needed to override some of my properties in that were specified in persistence.xml, specifically hibernate.dialect and hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto - for my test I want to use "create-drop", but in dev and production I just want to use "validate". I tried editing bootstrap/META-INF/persistence.properties in order to override the values but this seemingly had no effect. In the end I moved the properties that I wanted to override into their own perstence.properties in the EJB for the dev/production properties and set my test properties in bootstrap/META-INF/persistence.properties. Now my tests and my dev/production environments work appear to work. Is the factoring of the properties in this way legit or have I fluked it and Hibernate is just making some sensible defaults? Cheers, Chris. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4165398#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...