Considering the unprecedented surge in demandsand expectations of smart cloud-based services and applications, there is an increasing demand of scalable tools that can effectivelyevaluate the performance of these services and provide insightsfor improving their design and implementation. A realistic andaccurate emulation platform is a prerequisite for the efficientassessment of smart cloud data centers, and for improving thecapability and flexibility of utilizing the vast resources availableto smart cloud applications. The platform needs to be scalableand diverse enough to handle out of the box experiments, as wellas simple enough for ease of use and management. The overheadsincurred to meet these goals directly hamper the performance ofa framework. Therefore, mitigation of the overheads adds to thesalient features. In this paper, we present a reference model thatstrives to meet such requirements while addressing overheads. We demonstrate proof of the concept using off-the-shelf softwarecomponents and present some test cases of the performanceresults obtained by the implementation of our platform.