The current methods used to test and study peer-to-peer systems (namely modeling, simulation, or execution on real testbeds) often show limits regarding scalability, realism and accuracy. This paper describes and evaluates P2PLab, our framework to study peer-to-peer systems by combining emulation (use of the real studied application within a configured synthetic environment) and virtualization. P2PLab is scalable (it uses a distributed network model) and has good virtualization characteristics (many virtual nodes can be executed on the same physical node by using process-level virtualization). Experiments with the BitTorrent file-sharing system complete this article and demonstrate the usefulness of this platform.