You can actually use LVM on a live InnoDB instance as long as both the logs and tablespace reside on the same volume. There is no locking required. We actuall

You can actually use LVM on a live InnoDB instance as long as both the logs and tablespace reside on the same volume. There is no locking required. We actually used LVM at Facebook for MySQL backups for a while, however as you stated it requires at least double local space. In addition it is also a real nightmare on performance when it is running since it is double writing data locally to disk. So basically you need to run at < 50% utilization for some extended period of time to be able to take a snapshot successfully. We run much higher than that 24/7. When you aren't disk performance or space constrained then LVM snapshots can be a very good option.