Question : IP Blocks

In our office we have approx 20 Workstations and 3 servers.

1 x Mail Server
1 x VPN Server
1 x Web Server

We currently have 1 Static IP and do everything via NAT and Port forwarding which works ok but the setup is soon changing which requires us to look at getting a block of 8 Ips.

I understand that one is assigned to the router and you loose one for network and one for broadcast and the servers will take up 3 of them. Just curious on the setup as you cant seem to find much information im assuming you will assign one of them as "public" which performs the NAT functions as normal and allows all the workstations to access the internet.

But how would you configure the servers I was under the impression that you set the IP to be one of the global ips and set the default gateway to be the router global IP address?

The router does support 1 to 1 nat so that would seem to be the next choice.

Answer : IP Blocks

If you are perfoming NAT then you can have as many IP's as you like behind the router - having 8 public IP's just means you need to make some static translations
If you are getting a subnet 8 bits wide (255.255.255.248 - Subnet) then you are correct you will loose one - to the network and one to the broacast, then one will be taken by the router (this can be used as a public address as well, giving you 5 to use for static translations