Monthly Meetup for Network Engineering professionals or anyone interested in Cisco/Juniper/routers/switches/vpn/firewalls/any infrastructure that forwards packets. Open to all skill levels: Network+, CCENT/CCNA/CCNP/CCIE, JNCIA/JNCIS/JNCIP/JNCIE, and all points above, below, and in between. Bring your laptop to the meetup.

Virtual Lab Options

Packet Tracer
GNS3 / Dynagen / Dynamips
VMWare
Cisco VIRL
Cisco CML ←for example only

GNS3

GNS3 is a GUI topology builder for dynagen + dynamips with support. For example, you can have 12 devices running concurrently on a 4 core AMD processor with 8G ram (2010-ish) for your lab studies. Source: https://community.gns3.com/docs/DOC-1708

GNS3 also supports a variety of other topology testing such as:

Wireshark sniffing of topology links
Connectivity of topology to other things
Physical interfaces
Vmware
Virtual Box
KVM/qemu
Minimal Layer 2 capabilities

Resources

Unordered List ItemNANOG 64 just wrapped up and they seem to be putting their conference talks on youtube now. https://www.youtube.com/user/TeamNANOG/playlists
Cisco Design Zone
Cisco IOS Configuration Guides
Youtube is full of this stuff
INE CCNA (may be old?)
CCNA Kickstarter guy
IPExpert
Cisco Live Archive
NANOG Presentation Archive
www.irongeek.com ←archive of hacker con presentations
Security Weekly (formerly Pauldotcom)
GNS3 forums
INE forums
Cisco community support forums
/r/networking
/r/cisco
INE blog
Packet Pushers blog/podcast
Ivan Pepelnjak’s blog
NANOG email list
Cisco NSP email list
Juniper NSP email list