The antennas are arrayed along the three arms of a Y-shape (each of which measures 21 km/13 miles long). Using the railroad tracks that follow each of these arms – and that, at one point, intersect with U.S. Route 60 at a level crossing – and a specially designed lifting locomotive, the antennas can be physically relocated to a number of prepared positions, allowing aperture synthesis interferometry with a maximum baseline of 36 km (22.3 miles): in essence, the array acts as a single antenna with that diameter. The smallest angular resolution that can be reached is about 0.05 arcseconds at a wavelength of 7 mm.

There are four commonly used configurations, designated A (the largest) through D (the tightest, when all the dishes are within 600 m of the center point). The observatory normally cycles through all the various possible configurations (including several hybrids) every 16 months; the antennas are moved every three to four months. Moves to smaller configurations are done in two stages, first shortening the east and west arms and later shortening the north arm. This allows for a short period of improved imaging of extremely northerly or southerly sources.

The Array Operations Center (AOC) for the VLA is located on the campus of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, New Mexico. The AOC also currently serves as the control center for the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a VLBI array of ten 25-meter dishes located from Hawaii in the west to the U.S. Virgin Islands in the east that constitutes the world's largest dedicated, full-time astronomical instrument.

The VLA is a multi-purpose instrument designed to allow investigations of many astronomical topics. Objects that are commonly studied include radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars, supernova remnants, gamma ray bursts, radio-emitting stars, the sun and planets, astrophysical masers, black holes, and the hydrogen gas that comprises a large portion of the Milky Way galaxy as well as external galaxies. In 1989 the VLA was used to receive radio communications from the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew by Neptune.

The VLA is located between the towns of Magdalena, New Mexico and Datil, New Mexico, about fifty miles (80 km) west of Socorro, New Mexico, New Mexico, USA. U.S. Route 60 passes east-west through the complex.

The VLA site is open to visitors year round during daylight hours. A visitor center houses a small museum and a gift shop. A self-guided walking tour is available, as the visitor center is not staffed continuously. Visitors unfamiliar with the area are warned that there is little food onsite, or in the sparsely populated surroundings; those unfamiliar with the high desert are warned that the weather is quite variable, and can remain cold into April.

The VLA featured prominently in Carl Sagan's 1980 documentary Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, and is the setting for the beginning of the 1984 film 2010—with the same scene in the novel 2010: Odyssey Two, from which the film was adapted, being set at the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The 1985 novel Contact features a fictionalized version of the VLA, expanding the number of dishes to 131 and renaming it to the "Argus Array." For the 1997 film Contact, much of the outdoor footage was shot at the VLA site with the number of dishes visible on screen artificially increased by CGI, and the canyon depicted as being in the vicinity of the VLA is actually Canyon de Chelly in neighboring Arizona. It is also seen in the final scene of the alien-invasion film The Arrival, and the beginning of Independence Day, when the alien invaders were initially detected by SETI at the VLA.New Jersey rock band Bon Jovi shot the music video for "Everyday", at the VLA and a "dish" can be seen on the album's cover, named Bounce. Likewise Matt Harding can be seen dancing at this location in his second video.The cover for the Dire Straits album On The Night features the VLA.The VLA features in plans to save the world from satellites being pulled from orbit in the second volume of the comic book series G.I. Joe: America's Elite published by Devil's Due.The VLA could be visited in Auto Assault, a massively multiplayer online game that was set in post-apocalyptic America.

Congressional approval for the VLA project was given in August 1972, and construction began some six months later. The first antenna was put into place in September 1975 and the complex was formally inaugurated in 1980, after a total investment of USD $78.5 million.

With a view to upgrading the venerable 1970s technology with which the VLA was built, recent funding has been allocated for the conversion of the VLA into the Expanded Very Large Array ("EVLA"). The upgrade will enhance the instrument's sensitivity, frequency range, and resolution, and will install new hardware at the San Augustin site. A second phase of this upgrade to add up to eight additional dishes in other parts of the state of New Mexico, up to 300 km away, is currently unfunded.