Given that I have only one machine(high configuration laptop), can I run the entire DCOS on my laptop (for purely simulation/learning purpose). The way I was thinking to set this up was using some N number of docker containers (with networking enabled between them), where some of those from N would be masters, some slaves, one zookeeper maybe, and 1 container to run the scheduler/application. So basically the 1 docker container would be synonymous to a machine instance in this case. (since I don't have multiple machines and using multiple VMs on one machine would be an overkill)
Has this been already done, so that I can straight try it out or am I completely missing something here with regards to understanding?
We're running such a development configuration where ZooKeeper, Mesos Masters and Slaves as well as Marathon runs fully dockerized (but on 3 bare metal machine cluster) on CoreOS latest stable. It has some known downsides, like when a slave dies the running tasks cannot be recovered AFAIK by the restarted slave.
I think it also depends on the OS what you're running on your laptop. If it's non-Windows, you should normally be fine. If your system supports systemd, then you can have a look at tobilg/coreos-setup to see how I start the Mesos services via Docker.
Still, I would recommend to use a Vagrant/VirtualBox solution if you just want to test how Mesos works/"feels"... Those will probably save you some headaches compared to a "from scratch" solution. The tobilg/coreos-mesos-cluster project runs the services via Docker on CoreOS within Vagrant.
Also, you can have a look at dharmeshkakadia/awesome-mesos and especially the Vagrant based setup section to get some references.