I have bunch of JPA annotated entities along with a persistence.xml packaged as a normal jar. I package this jar in a EAR (along with a WAR) and deploy the whole thing under JBoss AS. The persistence unit is not recognized (I get an error saying myappEntityManagerFactory does not exist in JNDI).

If I package the jar as an EJB, the persistence unit is recognized and everything works ok. Does this mean that a persistence unit has to always be packaged as an EJB and hence I am tied to an EJB container?