Differences Between Testing and Running a Recovery Plan

Testing a recovery plan has no lasting effects on either the protected site or the recovery site, but running a recovery plan has significant effects on both sites.

You need different privileges when testing and running a recovery plan.

How Testing a Recovery Plan Differs from Running a Recovery Plan

Area of Difference	Test a Recovery Plan	Run a Recovery Plan
Required privileges	Requires Site Recovery Manager.Recovery Plans.Test permission.	Requires Site Recovery Manager.Recovery Plans.Recovery.
Effect on virtual machines at protected site	None	SRM shuts down virtual machines in reverse priority order.
Effect on virtual machines at recovery site	SRM suspends local virtual machines if the recovery plan requires this. SRM restarts suspended virtual machines after cleaning up the test.	SRM suspends local virtual machines if the recovery plan requires this.
Effect on replication	SRM creates temporary snapshots of replicated storage at the recovery site. For array-based replication, SRM rescans the arrays to discover them.	During a planned migration, SRM synchronizes replicated datastores, then stops replication, then makes the target devices at the recovery site writable. During a disaster recovery, SRM attempts the same steps , but if they do not succeed, SRMignores the errors.
Network	If you explicitly assign test networks, SRM connects recovered virtual machines to a test network. If virtual machine network assignment is Auto, SRMassigns virtual machines to temporary networks that are not connected to any physical network.	SRM connects recovered virtual machines to a datacenter network.
Interruption of recovery plan	You can cancel a test at any time.	You can cancel the recovery in some cases.

Thanks to VMware Documentation