My uni is teaching a distributed system course, which has sample programs using java RMI. I would like to test those program, and practice with Python as well in the future. How would I create an environment as if I have several networked computers (or a computer cluster)? I'm not sure about VMWare, VirtualBox or the like would be applicable. Preferably, the cluster should be easily created, configured and so on. Nobody would want to individually create, set up 10 machines in VirtualBox I suppose...Thanks.
Use VMWare or VirtualBox or Parallels, etc. THose will do exactly what you're looking for. They're seen on the network as hosts (depending on the mode you have them set in). I do this all the time.
You're going to want to set up several machines, and run them. Make sure that the Network Interface is setup properly, so that they can communicate with one another. When you start getting into this virtualization stuff, you can run into some issues with the hypervisor. But that occurs normally when there's an issue with the NATing. I just use bridged mode, and it works fine for me.