What do I need for a Cloud Network?

I'm a student in an IT program, and this is my last quarter of school. My instructor and I have been talking about constructing a private cloud network. Specifically we want to create a cloud network that provides IaaS, similar to that of Azure. It would only be available to our program, so there would be a small amount of users.

We are wondering if this would be a possibility and if it is what do we need to do?

What would be the hardware and software requirements et cetera for us to pull this off?