Just a heads up if you are running ND please unsure you read all the warnings in
publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinf...
We had a contractor talk management into letting them perform hot deploys despite the WebSphere administrators abjections and IBM’s warnings bellow and it blew up in our face and we had to recover from it which led to several days of no sleeps for the administrators.
Do not use hot deployment if you intend to export your application, generate a plug-in based on the application configuration, or perform other application management in the future. Changes that you make to your application files using hot deployment are not recognized by administrative console or wsadmin application management functions. Those functions recognize only the application files that administrative programs such as the console or wsadmin present during application installation, update or other management functions. The application management functions do not recognize files changed by hot deployment.
Important: Do not use hot deployment to update components in a production deployment manager managed cell. Hot deployment is well-suited for development and testing, but poses unacceptable risks to production environments. Full or partial resynchronization might erase hot deployed components. Also, running the restoreconfig command might overwrite changes made to expanded application files. Further, hot deployed components are not migrated between versions of WebSphere® Application Server. To add new components or modules to an enterprise application, reassemble the application EAR file so it has the new components or modules and then redeploy the EAR file.