From the community documentation:

hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto Automatically validates or exports schema DDL to the database when the SessionFactory is created. With create-drop, the database schema will be dropped when the SessionFactory is closed explicitly.

e.g. validate | update | create | create-drop

So the list of possible options are,

validate: validate the schema, makes no changes to the database.
update: update the schema.
create: creates the schema, destroying previous data.
create-drop: drop the schema at the end of the session.