I realize it may be a basic question (to the point I'm almost ashamed of asking it) but what is the point of using VRF?
I understand what it does I think. It allows for creating multiple virtual routers in a sense that routing decisions are separated into distinct segments, giving me multiple routing tables. This can be used to separate devices into discrete non-conflicting domains. By default the traffic cannot cross between these domains, unlike VLANs.
However, I'm struggling to see the benefit of VRF over VLAN+firewall. VLANs give me an easy way of separating the traffic of different kind (e.g. IPTV and normal) with rules in place to prohibit routing between different subnets. How is VRF different in that respect?
The only thing I found so far is that VRF allows for operation of networks where there are logically separated networks which have conflicting subnets (e.g. merge of two companies).