OVS stands for Open vSwitch, which is a software switch designed to enable virtual networking in data center environments. OVS provides advanced features such as VLAN tagging, Quality of Service (QoS) management, network address translation (NAT), and flow-based packet forwarding. It is commonly used in cloud computing platforms like OpenStack and Kubernetes to create and manage virtual networks between servers and containers. OVS can also be integrated with hardware switches to provide hybrid networking capabilities.