Setting up Zabbix test setup from production

[max96]

Hello everybody. I have a question regarding upgrading Zabbix
Currently I'm running a Zabbix 4.0 installation in production with some thousand hosts and some Zabbix proxy servers running. I now want to upgrade this installation from 4.0 to 6.0

In preparation to the upgrade I want to setup a test installation of Zabbix with a test database containing a data dump from production. My goal is to find out how long the database upgrade will take and also how our current settings and configurations will behave/look like in general after the upgrade.

My question: When setting up a "clone" installation from a running production environment, what should I be aware of? Can I just start an isolated zabbix server instance with the configuration and data from production? I do not want the test server to send thousands of notifications because it won't be able to reach all configured hosts. Or maybe interrupt anything in production.

Is there anyone who has a good experience with an upgrade from larger installations from 4.0 to 6.0 he may want's to share here? Or with setting up a test upgrade scenario as described above?
Your help is really appreciated! Thank you in advance!

[cyber]

What you need is a clone of your DB, on a platform, that you will be using later (requirements for 4 and 6 are different). Then you can install v6 server and when you first start it (having pointed it to your cloned v4 DB) then you can measure how much it takes to convert... Depending on your hardware speed, I would expect it to be done in 15-20 minutes...
When you clone your environment, then before starting up, run a query directly in DB to disable all hosts and actions. Then you will not get any accidental alarms or polling of hosts from "wrong" instance.
update hosts set status=1 where status = 0;
update actions set status=1;