I highly recommend that you try it on real hardware if you're going to try it at all. It's much, much snappier, even on a Pentium II or III, on a real machine than in a VM.
"The 80186 would have been a natural successor to the 8086 in personal computers. However, because its integrated hardware was incompatible with the hardware used in the original IBM PC, the 80286 was used as the successor instead in the IBM PC/AT."