A physical-layer-impairment (PLI)-awareness based optical multicast mechanism is proposed for OpenFlow controlled optical networks. This proposed approach takes the PLI models including linear and non-linear factors into optical multicast controlled by OpenFlow protocol. Thus, the proposed scheme is able to cover nearly all PLI factors of each optical link and to conduct optical multicast with better communication quality. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can obtain the better performance of OpenFlow controlled optical multicast services.