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Well, you probably will receive only diplomatic answers here too.

It will work with the builtin ES instance.
But search is used widely, not only in backend. Do you use Asset Publisher? Well, it uses search internally. ES is used by several components internally.

Personally, I would use the builtin ES instance only in development environments, but in the end, it's your choice.

Hi John Joseph,

Embedded Elasticsearch is not supported in production environments, see following page: https://dev.liferay.com/discover/deployment/-/knowledge_base/7-1/configuring-elasticsearch-for-liferay-0#embedded-vs-remote-operation-mode

Embedded vs. Remote Operation Mode

When you start Liferay Portal, this message is displayed in the log:

2018-12-10 16:20:32.987 WARN [Elasticsearch initialization thread][EmbeddedElasticsearchConnection:288] Liferay is configured to use embedded Elasticsearch as its search engine. Do NOT use embedded Elasticsearch in production. Embedded Elasticsearch is useful for development and demonstration purposes. Refer to the documentation for details on the limitations of embedded Elasticsearch. Remote Elasticsearch connections can be configured in the Control Panel.

When you install Liferay Portal, Elasticsearch is already embedded. In embedded mode, Elasticsearch search runs in the same JVM to make it easy to test-drive with minimal configuration. Running both servers in the same process has drawbacks:

• Elasticsearch must use the same JVM options as Liferay Portal.
  
• Liferay Portal and Elasticsearch compete for resources.

As you say you have access to Liferay Support, If you finally use Embedded Elasticsearch in production and you have any problem there, Liferay support service won't be able to help you.

You will also have problems in case you are using a Liferay cluster, as each node will have its own Embedded Elasticsearch and their data won't be sync, so searchs won't work properly.

Okay, everyone is quoting doco and stuff but not really answering the question, IMHO.

You must offload Elastic because it is a huge memory and CPU hog.

You might think you are not using search, but Liferay uses it for everything.

When you start Liferay w/ the embedded Elastic, it takes some of the memory for its own purposes, limiting the resources available to Liferay and serving traffic. It will apply a hit to response time because it is servicing the internal requests, etc.

​​​​​​​So yes, you absolutely need to offload Elastic to a separate JVM whether you think you are using search or not.