Access container directly from network

Hello,
I’ve been trying to solve this problem for more than a week.
My situation is as follows:

VMware machine with docker 17.06, in our company network. I have two containers with the same app (they communicate with each other).
Developers need to access the containers directly (ideally through ip), so they can test their code.
We tried the classic approach, with port forwarding, but unfortunately, our developed app does not work with that. We can connect to 10.11.40.166:2100 which is then forwarded to 172.17.0.2:2100 (container). But our app will throw an error, because the input IP is different from the IP that is returned by the app running in docker container.

Any idea how to solve this? I tried to attach the containers directly to our network like any other VM, but I haven’t been successful.
I would be glad for any suggestion, I tried almost everything (macvlan, docker bridge, mapping host ip with port (like 10.11.40.166:2100).
Thanks!