I want to use Truenas Scale purely for storage.
Is there any way to disable all the extra functionality(containers/vm/apps) completely?
Why? I just want to maximise resources available for the functionality I am using.
Don’t add a VM, container or set up apps and no resources will be taken by those services.
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As Neo says. Specifically, configuring the apps service and setting a pool for it will start that service–so if you don’t do those things, it won’t be running.
There’s no way to remove those services from the product completely.
A plain vanilla installation would be the answer here. You can setup your user account, setup your shares, and stop there. That is pretty minimal. I do somewhat the same thing on my server:
- Install TrueNAS.
- Setup my user account.
- Import my pool (or create one if yo do not have one already).
- Setup my SMB shares.
The extra few things I do, that you would not need to do.
5. When I setup my user account, enable SSH login and root access.
6. Setup my Multi-Report script to run via CRON Job.
7. I do run a small VM as well for monitoring if the internet is present and if not, an email is generated 5 minutes after the internet is restored. This is only to monitor how bad my internet provider has been.
Any other TrueNAS background activity supports the NAS functions.
Why do I run a minimal TrueNAS? I prefer to run VMs on ESXi. I use to run TrueNAS on ESXi and it worked flawlessly.
A serious question: What resources do you feel are problematic or just not working as you might feel they should? Maybe if we know what might be going on, we can offer a suggestion on how to address it, even if you don’t like the answer. And sometimes I can see a solution outside the box that would normally not be used. What can I say, I do strange things at times.
A serious question: What resources do you feel are problematic…
I don’t know…hence the reason to ask the community see what wisdom and experience is out there.
I generally have the view that if I am not using something I like to disable it or turn it off.
Quite happily using core at the moment but will need to move to scale at some point so just doing due diligence.
In TrueNAS, the default state of things is disabled. So unless you specifically ask for a capability, it does not consume any resources, it is disabled by omission.
Generally we take some pains to avoid having anything running that impacts NAS workloads. What features exist and are “always-on” in our middleware etc are what is required to support important NAS features or related features (for example replication state management). We do take some pains to make sure things stay as lightweight as possible for TrueNAS for NAS usage because it’s a NAS product 
If something we write does have a significant performance impact in default state we generally treat that as a defect to be fixed.
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I think that this is really not something that you need to worry about. I run mine as a VM with 6 vcpu cores and 12gb of ram and its fine (1 tailscale container). CPU usage is very low when idle. It uses 2.6GB of ram for services and the rest is zfs cache or free sometimes.
Hell I run this on a core 2 duo backup with 8gb ram in as a backup and it runs fine (though I had to do some USB boot loader shenanigans to get it to boot properly).
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My Xeon D-1521, which is a 11 year old 4-core CPU clocked 2.7GHz, hovers at 1-3% usage running 6 apps and an ubuntu VM.
So I would not be too worried about "wasted resources ".