If you want to do the same thing, build a cluster of complete machines, in a ligh-weight manner, just for the learning experience, you can use incus to create containers in the same manner. As they are all complete machines and you bridge them, you get DHCP allocation identical to running a little PC on the local LAN. If you have ssh set up in the image, as described, you can run the identical scripts.

As a plus, if you run them on ZFS with de-dup, even the disk cost for new machines is miniscule.