RHEL 7.4 - cant get network working

Dell PowerEdge R630.
Installed RHEL7.4 on a physical server (not VMware).

I configured the network-config to use the old naming convention by placing "net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0" at the end of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in the /etc/default/grub file.

Then I ran:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
mv ifcfg-em3 ifcfg-eth3

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In this server, ports 2 and 3 are connected so I am working with port3.

Then I disabled the Network Manager because I found posts online saying this could cause issues.

systemctl stop NetworkManager
systemctl disable NetworkManager

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When I reboot the server - I do see the eth3 connection up when i do 'ifconfig' but I have no connectivity at all. No pings works except pinging the local IP.

I checked the HWADDR in the ifcfg-eth3 files matched the actual MAC address by appending that file

cat /sys/class/net/eth3/address >> ifcfg-eth3

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and then setting that address as 'HWADDR'

when i try starting the network.service I get this error:



Any idea what I am missing here? This is config of ifcfg-eth3:








EDIT: I noticed I had an 'ifcfg-eth1' file with no config inside. I wrote in ONBOOT=NO and BOOTPROTO=none. Rebooted the server and now the network.service is active but still do not have any connectivity.
There are still multiple messages stating 'RTNETLINK answers: File exists.