EtherCAT Testing?

Is it possible to do any useful testing of EtherCAT hardware with a virtual machine running Linuxcnc? 

I fully understand that Linuxcnc can't run with any realtime capabilities within a virtual machine.  But can an Ethercat configuration be set up, configured and connect to a real Ethercat device for testing purposes?  I don't want to set up and run a machine this way.  I would just like to see if I can read some IO modules, maybe configure/talk a drive and send it a command for bench testing.

What all could you expect this to do?  What things would be expected to not work at all?  What might sort of work?  Can Linuxcnc communicate with a Beckhoff PLC if so to what extent?   

I tend to think that EtherCAT doesn't add any timing constraints.
Worthwhile to do a test. But you can't run a realtime linux kernel in a virtual machine, can you?

The real time kernels run, they just don't "work" as in the latency for real time tasks is about the same as running a non real time kernel.

If it is just for testing, you can just set up the network interface in the virtual machine.