A better plan is to light up your disaster recovery plan weekly, and while the DR system is handling the load, scrub to your hearts content on the down system.

Depending on the cost of your hardware vs the cost of your labor vs the cost of downtime, dual servers, one flagged as production and one flagged as development, alternate flags every weekend, might work out. You'll hear lots of bragging about that not being possible because the hardware is too expensive, not so much bragging about labor cost and downtime cost. I worked at financial services corp about two decades ago where downtime was supposedly in excess of $1M/hr. They had triple mainframes set up, basically three machine rooms inside the machine room.