The effective configuration of all the repositories and their workspaces can be known thanks to the method getConfigurationXML() that is exposed through JMX at the RepositoryServiceConfiguration level in case of a PortalContainer the name of the related MBean will be of type exo:portal=${portal-container-name},service=RepositoryServiceConfiguration. This method will give you the effective configuration in XML format that has been really interpreted by the the JCR core. This could be helpful to understand how your repositories/workspaces are configured especially if you would like to overwrite the configuration for some reasons.