Forum Discussion
After talking to the AWS side, I got a partial answer to this issue. According to my contact from the AWS, the image from the marketplace should be similar to the custom baked image, both of which need to reach out to the F5 license server to activate the license during launch. However, my problem is that my BigIp VE is launched within VPC which has no internet access, and thus can't contact the F5 license servers.
They expect this to work theoretically if the BigIp VE is launched in EC2-classic(internet accessible). However, it didn't work for my image and still shows issue as I mentioned in the question. I suspect that my BigIp image is from a VPC instance. And some of its state baked into the custom image confused the new instance launched from non-VPC environment.
Unfortunately, I don't have the knowledge to trouble shoot the issue, and F5 refuse to run support case for AWS VE instance. Bummer!