With Docker Inc. buying Unikernel Systems and sparking renewed interest in unikernel technology, 2016 is shaping to be an undeniably year of unikernels. OSv is the revolutionary new open source technology that combines the power of virtualization and micro-services architecture. This combination allows unmodified applications deployed in a virtualized environment to outperform bare-metal deployments. Yes. You've heard it right: for the first time ever we can stop asking the question of how much performance would I lose if I virtualize. OSv lets you ask a different question: how much would my application gain in performance if I virtualize it. This talk will start by looking into the architecture of OSv and the kind of optimizations it makes possible for native, unmodified applications. We will then focus on JVM-specific optimizations and specifically on speedups available to big data and NoSQL projects when they are deployed on OSv. We will also cover a companion project Seastar that is now being used as a base for a hight performant replacement for Apache Cassandra, beating the Apache implementation on most of the benchmarks.