WAR files on managed servers

Question

I have a question about placing new war files in production. First, why
does WebLogic recommend AGAINST using auto-deploy in production? Is it
for security or stability and what are those arguements?
Second, do I need to move the actual war file to the managed servers
(seperate hardware from the domain admin)? Does it always read the war
file from the domain admin, or will it also read it from it's local
disk? If it does also read locally, which one would take priority? I am
looking for the most reliable way to move new war files into production,
but I do not want to be manually moving files around to the managed
servers if they are never being used.

Answer 1

Another option, although not near as good as a stand-alone tool, I think you could put in the WSDL address for a particular managed server in the Admin Consoles test client. For example, on my machine with the example's server, that is bound to http://localhost:7001/wls_utc/
The one issue might be if you front-end address that gets put in your WSDL doesn't match the managed server that you want to test, then you might need to edit it first, which is probably a pain.
The test client used to be a stand alone deployment (at least I think it was in the 9.2 days), but it appears to be part of an internal application now from the docs:
http://edocs.bea.com/wls/docs103/deployment/managing.html#wp1021614