Using Visual Studio licenses for test development on MS SQL Server

If you have an MSDN subscription, you can download Standard/Enterprise Edition from MSDN. But those instances are not licensed for production use, as I understand. And if you are collecting data on these instances that you later copy to production, that is production use in my book.

If all you have is a Visual Studio license, without MSDN, the answer is no.

Beware that this is a technical forum, and all answers you get related to licensing are layman answers. To get a authoritative answer, you need to contact a Microsoft licensing specialist.