Hi and welcome to the Community!
That really depends what your needs are As a matter of fact, you can do application-consistent snapshots using VSC via VSS integration - it is far from a fully blown backup / recover functionality (e.g. you need to truncate logs manually), but might be enough for some people.
'Traditional' NetApp stack though would look as follows:
- VSC for protecting OS partitions of your VMs
- SnapDrive for managing data partitions (typically RDMs) inside VMs
- relevant SnapManager products for protecting your application data - SQL, Exchange, Oracle, SharePoint & even SAP
SnapProtect is an alternative to this. Although in NetApp camp it looks a bit like a new kid on the block, it is in fact a rebadged CommVault Simpana, which is a very mature & feature-rich solution, very well suited for a virtual environment. It still leverages NetApp snapshots though for taking backups.
Regards,
Radek