Systems and methods are provided for managing multicast data transmission in a network having a plurality of switches arranged in a Dragonfly network topology, including: receiving a multicast transmission at an edge port of a switch and identifying the transmission as a network multicast transmission; creating an entry in a multicast table within the switch; routing the multicast transmission across the network to a plurality of destinations via a plurality of links, wherein at each of the links the multicast table is referenced to determine to which ports the multicast transmission should be forwarded; and changing, when necessary, the virtual channel used by each copy of the multicast transmission as the copy progresses through the network.