I had to look into this closely for a clients Development and UAT environments and Jason has that right, MSDN subscriptions are absolutely the way to go for this.
The link below covers the use of MSDN licenses for Dev and UAT environments. Hopefully that and some of the sections I've pulled out below will help you, As always though, refer to a licensing specialist if you have access through a LAR or similar?
Regards
Paul.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13350
In this document, there is a fairly clear discussion on what constitutes a Production, development and test environment.
A production environment is defined as an environment that is accessed by end users of an application (such as an Internet Web site) and
that is used for more than Acceptance Testing of that application or Feedback. Some scenarios that constitute production environments include:
- Environments that connect to a production database.
- Environments that support disaster-recovery or backup for a production environment.
- Environments that are used for production at least some of the time, such a server that is rotated into production during peak periods of activity.
Page 15 of the document covers Acceptance Testing in more detail in the section entitled Scenarios in which unlicensed users can use the software
Acceptance Testing (UAT)
At the end of a software development project, end users (or team members such as a business sponsor or product manager acting as proxies for end users, particularly in cases where its infeasible or impossible for the
actual end users of the program to participate) typically review an application and determine whether it meets the necessary criteria for releasea process often called user acceptance testing or UAT.The software may be accessed by end users who
do not have an MSDN subscription for purposes of acceptance testing, provided that the use of the software otherwise complies with all MSDN licensing terms.
It is rare that someone whose primary role is designing, developing, or testing the software would also qualify as an end user.
Acceptance testing must not use live production data. If a
copy of any live production data is used, then that copy of the data must be discarded after the testing is complete and cannot be incorporated back into the live production data.