I am not sure why you had issues in the past. A NetApp volume snapshot is a point in time copy of the volume. All the blocks that are in use are locked. It does not matter if the snapshot was created with an application or a scheduled snapshot. While there could be issues with backup applications. The snapshot will contain any VM in a crash consistent state. We can recover a VM from a volume manually. Please let me know if you have questions. Below are KBs that will help with manual recovery.
How to manually restore a VMware ESX virtual machine from a snapshot volume/LUN
How to manually restore a VMware ESX virtual machine from an NFS volume/datastore snapshot