Both are possible with Veeam.

Application aware backups are transactional consistent. You will use them for applications like databases or exchange to be sure that the application is recoverable to a consistent state with all transactions in a defined status.

The “normal” snapshot backups are crash consistent. You will use them for all other systems and applications where it does not matter that every single action is in a defined status.

You can do (I assume vSphere Backup jobs)

• Crash consistent. This happens when do not enable VMware Tools Quiescence and Guest Processing.
• Application Aware (incl. VSS). This happens when you enable Guest Processing. This is recommended by Veeam
• “VSS Aware” and Disk Quiescence. When you just enable VMware Tools Quiescence.
• Additional you can use freeze-only backups. These are Storage Snapshots-only backups without VMware Snapshots.

To simplify it even further

Crash Consistent = state of the machine at the time  when the VM was powered off e.g. Any data/transactions held in memory is/are lost

Transactional Consistent = Veeam instructs VM to commit data/transactions to disk, before taking the backup

?

https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-create-a-consistent-vm-backup.html 

This one is still relevant, even 7 years later..

I think everyone has covered it and that blog is still very relevant.