Our first attempt at making a vdev light rig test did not turn out the way it should have. In dealing with the color management of our renders, our first thought was to keep everything in raw to have a linear workflow. We imported the HDR as raw, set the color management settings in the preferences to apply output transform to renderer, and set the viewport settings to raw. But after taking all these precautions, it still didn't look right to me, the whites are too blown out, the blacks are too dark, and the black plastic sphere is not showing any reflections. We tried everything we could think of but I still wasn't convinces that this is the way it should look.
So after some help from the class and some feedback from Dave, we found out that the viewport needs to stay in sRGB gamma, not raw, so see the correct results. So now we are on the right track to making a proper vdev light rig.