Big-IP VE cannot get any nic other than mgmt to talk on the network.

Hi all. I am trying to evaluate Big-IP VE to use for dev/testing at work. We have an HA pair of physical boxes, but would like a test sandbox. The eventual destination will be inside gns3 topologies, but for now I am just trying to get one up and running in ESXi standalone. Not having much luck. 

I have unpacked and setup a few trial and error vm's over the last few days and it seems that no matter what I do, the only nic that is functional after setup is mgmt (eth0)

Focusing on just one nic for now:

eth3 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:29:74:6C:46
inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fe74:6c46/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING PROMISC ALLMULTI MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1304 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:108542 (105.9 KiB) TX bytes:4106 (4.0 KiB)

external Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:29:74:6C:46
inet addr:192.168.0.5 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fe74:6c46/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:778 (778.0 b)

This nic is intended to be my "external" network in my virtual topology. It's actually my LAN so that testing access to virtual test machines through the f5 will be easier as I can just test from my laptop rather than a vm on an isolated vswitch.  However, this nic does not even present a mac address to the network. If I try to ping it, I will only see an Incomplte ARP entry in that vlan on the router. 

I'd really like to figure out what is going on as I cannot proceed with the eval until I can get these nics to come online. 

This is ESXi 6.0 standalone and Big-IP VE v13

Any thoughts?