Config at Scale:
Designing Host Management
for Datacenter

Background

Imagine managing hundreds of servers, each needing to match the same security policies, network settings, and storage configurations. In most environments, that meant doing it by hand, host by host, with no way to know when something had drifted.

No built-in way to manage configuration at scale

Infrastructure admins were responsible for ensuring every host in a cluster matched organizational requirements. But vSphere had no way to define what "correct" looked like across a cluster, let alone detect when a host drifted from it. The only option was manual: checking and reconfiguring each host individually.

Define once, apply everywhere

Configuration Profiles gave admins a way to define a desired state once and apply it to every host in a cluster in a single operation, with automatic compliance checking and drift remediation built in.

My Role

This was my first project at VMware. I collaborated with another designer on the team, picking up work originally established by the team's lead designer who had gone on parental leave. My scope covered the onboarding flow and configuration editing UI, with contributions to the compliance view. The broader team spanned India, Bulgaria, and California.

I also initiated and ran usability testing, which wasn't part of the original plan. The existing personas didn't give me enough to design with confidence.

Main Workflow

The underlying system was powerful, but its source of truth was a dense JSON file built by engineers, for engineers. Making steps 2 and 3 usable for IT administrators without losing the precision they depend on was the central design problem.

Design Challenges

The solution: progressive disclosure through toggles

Configuration settings panels are inherently dense and text-heavy. There's little room for anything that isn't functional. Empty states are a rare exception: a moment of whitespace that most products leave blank. We used that space intentionally. Working with our visual designer, we created illustrations that brought warmth and gave admins a clear cue about what to do next.

Research & Iteration

This was my first project at VMware. The existing user personas didn't give me enough to design with confidence. I didn't know how admins thought about host configuration day-to-day, what tools they were already using, or how much they'd trust a new automated system. So I recruited participants myself through our design newsletter, which had a list of customers who'd opted in to give feedback.

Before this feature existed, what admins described set the tone for the whole project:

Testing the toggles

For the configuration editing UI, I asked: "Is there a setting you would configure that you don't see here? What would you do?" Most participants discovered hidden settings using the "show unconfigured optional settings" toggle without any prompting. The progressive disclosure approach was intuitive, not a source of confusion.

Updating the onboarding flow

I inherited the onboarding flow when the lead designer went on parental leave. The structure was sound but the layout didn't make the next step obvious. After importing or selecting a host's existing settings, admins land in a state where they can optionally review and edit the configuration before applying. The update made this optional step more visible, with clear signposting of what they'd just done and what to do next. It reduced hesitation at a consequential moment.

Button order in the compliance view

The compliance view had buttons ordered to match the system's internal logic rather than how admins actually think. The original sequence put Remediate before Run Pre-check, which is backwards from how admins actually think: why fix something before you know it's safe to fix?

The reordered flow — Check Compliance → Run Pre-check → Remediate — matches the admin's mental model and gates the most destructive action behind a safety check.

Outcomes

The feature freed infrastructure admins to focus on delivering value to their business rather than spending time on manual configuration maintenance. Equally important: the GUI empowered junior admins without deep JSON knowledge to manage host settings confidently — no longer dependent on senior colleagues for routine tasks.

Initiating the research on my first VMware project shaped how I approach every project since. Personas are a starting point, not a substitute for real conversations. The quotes from those eight sessions gave the whole team a shared understanding of user reality that no internal document could have provided.