Snapshots in a VMWARE environment

how exactly are you restoring vmdsk from NetApps snapshots ? Entire datastore gets rolled back ? 

No, but a volume level snapshot allows the ESX guys to browse the .snapshot directory and select a single vmdk file.

if they are browsing .snapshot directory then they are using file storage of your filer, not block storage. You can't do that with block storage (maybe VVOLs support in the future). With VMAX snapshots you will either restore the entire datastore or present that snapshot to another ESX server, import datastore and look for your VMs ...very cumbersome.

Right, I knew that but my question is, how are people solving this problem. When you lose the .snapshot capability by migrating datastores to VMAX SAN, how do you replace that functionality? A snapshot of the VMFS LUNs would be combersome true, but I was wondering if there were any tools to make it less combersome. Maybe something with good integration with ESX/vSphere to ensure consistent snap copies. And automation that would import it into a recovery server.

Or do people simply install backup agents into each VM?

There are many backup tools that perform image level backup of VMs, obviously Avamar from EMC.