While the marketplace provides the Appliance Template (.gns3a) , you must still provide the actual .qcow2 image downloaded from Cisco. Deployment and Usage

Without a valid license, the router is typically rate-limited to 200 Kbps .

: Since Alex was using a QCOW2 image directly, he followed the specific instruction to comment out the CDROM section of the XML, which is usually only needed for .iso installations.