Our Co. is wanting a pristine training environment to conduct training. Their idea is set up the company with a certain set of data that they would train with everytime they train a new user. They would do the training and when done we'd refresh the data back to the way it was so they could perform the training again.

Would it work to create separate VRC's/co.'s on our DEV Box or would it be better to run a completely separate instance of Baan with its own database?

Our DEV Box is the current training environment which they do not like since we do development of Baan components, configurator changes and it also gets data refreshed monthly. I'd like to use the DEV Box and not purchase additional hardware if possible. The boxes are HP Itanium 11.23 servers with Baan IVc4 SP16 on Oracle 9.2.0.5

Just looking for advice.
Thanks!

Doing the training in the development server in a separate VRC would be fine. I have done it both ways (separate VRC vs separate server) and both have their advanatages and disadvantages. Using the development server is a money saving move at the hardware and possibly database standpoint, but adds a little complexity to the development server environment, with more companies, users, and authorizations.

The advantage of having a pilot/training and development environment in the same system are in the code management area, where the developed change is "elevated" to the training VRC, reviewed against a known data environment, then applied to the production server. In this setup, the VRC structure would look like (assuming that you aren't using any localizations/extensions):

c4
c4U_stnd
c4S_trn <-- Training companies/users at this level
c4S_dev <-- Developers here

We use 4 environment:

Development
Test (used for testing new developments by consultants)
Acceptance (used by key users to test new developments, training)
Production

Development and Test are setup in one environment with different VRC's.

Regards,
Han

Our Evironment looks like:
c4
c4U_stnd
c4_PROD

So we could insert a c4_trn in there between U_stnd and c4_PROD with it's own companies? The trainers are mostly just wanting a consistent training environment to work from.

Yes. After inserting the VRC and connecting companies to it. You will probably want to import software (scripts, forms, reports, tables, domains, etc) into this VRC, then convert to runtime data dictionary.

Thanks for your help and advice.