Maven 3 no longer supports org.apache.maven.global-settings (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-3914) the new way of specifying a global settings file is using -gs or --global-settings. The MAVEN_OPTS as configured in Jenkins is inserted too early in the commandline and the options will be interpreted as JVM options thus giving an error. The easiest solution probably is to have two OPTS:

• MAVEN_JVM_OPTS is what the current MAVEN_OPTS is (actual JVM OPTS)
• MAVEN_OPTS is specified after the phases in the command line and can contain actual maven options

The only was to push in custom global settings when using maven 3 is to replace the settings.xml in the Jenkins/tools/maven