Test Environment Best Practices

Hey guys, sorry if this has been addressed before, I searched and didn’t fine much.

I’m new with Epicor and ERP systems in general. I’ve recently been tasked with setting up an Epicor 10 Install based off a skeleton database from Epicor 9. We’re under 50 users and have a beefy HyperVisor so I put E10 on it’s own server, DB and App server sharing the same VM. Now I’m tasked with creating a test environment for the devs to start making some BPMs.

Right now, in Epicor 9, we have our DB and App servers separated with an addition DB server per test environment. They all utilize the same AppServer. From my understanding this is required due to licensing with Epicor. However, right now I’m pretty sure we’re out of compliance with our SQL Server licensing due to this.

Is this the ideal way to handle it? Separate Servers and separate SQL Instances for each environment? Can I just add a SQL Instance on the existing DB and utilize that barring load issues? If not, do you guys have any tricks to automate the deployment of a SQL Server Eval license and copy over a live DB?

Any help regarding this is greatly appreciated. Let me know if you have any questions or need any more information. Thanks!