This is a great way to test things. I have my VM team spin up a system, and I go so far as to detach and copy production DB to NPMTest DB.
WARNING: know your environment. this may cause duplicate polling and overhead in environment.
Install SQL or NPM if need to use eval SQL.
Reattach production DB and copy test db to new system and attach to the SQL on new system. Then I delete most of the nodes, only keeping basically one of each kind.
If installed NPM, run config wizard again and point to test DB and tell NPM that this polling engine is primary.
assign nodes to this polling engine.
now you can "test" with an environment very close to your prod.