Virtual laboratories and their usage in university environment

In today's digital age there is a great need for smart and experienced networking professionals. In order for someone to become a network expert, in addition to theoretical knowledge, it is necessary to acquire practical skills. One way of acquiring practical skills is to use real facilities in a specialized network laboratory. Such laboratories are being built to provide a variety of network equipment and technologies that specialists can encounter in practice. However, building network laboratories is too time-consuming and, last but not least, costly. Although working on real facilities brings many advantages, we will ultimately find a few limitations in most laboratories. The constraints associated with a network laboratory may vary, but the biggest problem is in terms of flexibility, financial requirements, and overall sustainability of the operation of such a laboratory. For several years, the replacement of physical devices, whether computers or network devices, through virtualization has been developing intensively. Virtualization itself provides additional possibilities for more efficient use of hardware resources, allowing the development and deployment of new types of network laboratories and thus virtual network laboratories. It is sufficient to use general computer hardware with virtualization software to operate such a laboratory. We are convinced that virtual laboratories will become an integral part in studying and improving networking. Based on these facts, in the article we will focus on the analysis and description of available solutions of virtual laboratories, focusing on teaching process of the network subjects in college. The article offers an insight into how such laboratories are used in daily teaching process, as well as the experience or requirements of the laboratory that we have gained in their use.